http://pjmedia.com/ronradosh/2013/04/22/recognizing-that-radical-islam-is-our-enemy-lessons-from-the-cold-war/?print=1 Let us no longer speculate about the motive for the actions of the Tsarnaev brothers: despite growing up in the United States, both became adherents of radical Islam. This truth, in our politically correct age, we are not supposed to mention. To do so in liberal circles is to be accused of Islamophobia. Ignoring the […]
http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2013/04/mosque-related_violence.html President Obama has done all he can these past five years to manipulate language and facts in order to exonerate Islam and Moslems from terrorist attacks committed in the U.S. by Moslems in the name of Islam and jihad. After Nidal Hassan at Fort Hood mowed down numerous innocents while chanting “Allahu Akbar,” Mr. […]
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/04/tamerlan_tsarnaev_and_a_lesson_to_the_inhabitants_of_the_world.html What’s in a name? In the case of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, an understanding of the man after whom he is named is essential to grasp to historic forces on whose behalf he allegedly embraced cruel terror, bringing along his kid brother Dzhokhar. The late Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev, an ethnic Chechen Muslim, […]
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/04/can_a_president_who_has_promised_to_stand_with_the_muslims_protect_americans.html In Obama’s Audacity of Hope, he stated, “I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in any ugly direction.” He also asserted in Bob Woodward’s Obama’s Wars, “We can absorb [another] terrorist attack.” These are two straightforward statements that raise the question of whether a man who has been seemingly obsessed […]
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324874204578438913145965432.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
Flight Delays as Political Strategy
The FAA furloughs traffic controllers rather than cut other spending.
President Obama’s sequester scare strategy has been a political flop, but his government keeps trying. The latest gambit is to force airline flight delays until enough travellers stuck on tarmacs browbeat enough Republicans to raise taxes again.
This week the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) began furloughing each of its air-traffic controllers for one day out of every 10 to achieve roughly $600 million in savings this fiscal year. The White House dubiously claims that the furloughs are required by the sequester spending cuts enacted in 2011.
Capitol Hill Republicans say the White House is free to make other cuts instead. House Transportation and Infrastructure Chairman Bill Shuster suggests the FAA first take a whack at the $500 million it’s spending on consultants, or perhaps the $325 million it blows on supplies and travel.
In case there’s any doubt about the President’s ability to prioritize, at least two GOP Senators, Jerry Moran and Roy Blunt, have written bills to clarify Mr. Obama’s authority to make sensible spending decisions. He’s not interested, and Senate Democrats have blocked such reforms. Making smart choices about federal sending would spoil the fun of creating flight delays and then blaming Republicans.
So this week the FAA has managed to turn the first stages of a 5% budget cut into hours of delays at the nation’s airports. The furloughs are landing on air-traffic controllers as much as they are on less vital FAA jobs. Officials at the Department of Transportation, the FAA’s parent bureaucracy, say it would be bad for morale to impose heavier furloughs on the employees who don’t direct airplanes. DOT has also ruled out any reductions in the FAA workforce to achieve the needed savings, along with most other obvious options that a private business would explore.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MID-01-230413.html
Turkey’s economy came to a dead stop during the first quarter, but the country’s credit bubble continues to grow.
Under the headline “Ankara’s Economic Miracle Collapses”, I argued a year ago in the Middle East Quarterly that Turkey’s economic prowess had more hype than substance. The government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan had financed a consumer bubble with a huge trade deficit financed by short-term interbank loans. The consumer boom is gone, but the credit bubble continues, with bank lending still expanding by 30% a year despite the stalled economy.
Turkey’s current account deficit remains in the red-alert region of nearly 10% of GDP, and it continues to finance the deficit with short-term interbank borrowings. Bubbles like this eventually blow up.
Turkey cannot blame global economic conditions, because emerging market economies are growing at 5.5% this year in the International Monetary Fund’s estimate while Turkey is not growing at all. Turkey’s government debt remains quite low at just 36% of GDP, but private-sector debt – especially short-term foreign debt – has tripled in the past four years.
Most of the US$80 billion in short-term money that Turkey has borrowed since 2010 probably came from the Gulf states, which have a strategic interest in preserving a Sunni power with an army larger than Iran’s. This largesse cannot continue indefinitely, though. Turkey’s central bank promised to reduce its foreign deficit by reducing growth. Now the growth is gone, but not the deficit. The galloping increase in bank debt indicates that Turkish banks are lending their customers just enough to pay the interest on past loans.
This puts Erdogan’s political future in question. His Justice and Development Party (AKP) won the past two national elections on the strength of its economic record. Many Turks are caught in a consumer debt spiral, borrowing to pay a 32% interest rate on credit card obligations. Consumer spending has already started to fall. A few months more of this and Erdogan’s mandate will start to crumble.
The numbers tell the story.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/21/diaper-free-babies-elimination-communication_n_3125617.html?icid=maing-grid10%7Chtmlws-main-bb%7Cdl34%7Csec1_lnk2%26pLid%3D302354
Elimination Communication: Diaper-Free Trend Gets First Ever Week-Long Celebration (POLL)
The first annual Go Diaper Free! Week starts today. Spearheaded by Andrea Olson, author of EC Simplified: Infant Potty Training Made Easy, the event is an effort to raise awareness of EC or Elimination Communication, DNAInfo reports.With coverage on the local New York City news site and in The New York Times this weekend, parents online certainly have potty training top of mind.
According to the Times, Elimination Communication, which the newspaper first reported on in 2005, is now “finding an audience in the hipper precincts of New York City.” Specifically, both The Times and DNAInfo point to a store in the hipster mecca of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where growing numbers of new parents are attending Diaper Free in NY meetups. These gatherings include information sessions and are B.Y.O.P. (bring your own potty) — but there is a restroom.
So, what is Elimination Communication and why are parents doing it? EC is “NOT potty training,” the homepage of Diaper Free Baby states clearly. “It is a gentle, natural, non-coercive process by which a baby, preferably beginning in early infancy, learns with the loving assistance of parents and caregivers to communicate about and address his or her elimination needs.” In other words — no diapers, some mess and lots of holding baby over the potty, bowls or containers and even the street, as needed. It is, along with breastfeeding, co-sleeping and babywearing, sometimes considered an integral part of attachment parenting.
As Olson details on her website, the goals of EC range from being environmentally friendly — Go Diaper Free! Week is timed to coincide with all things green that have grown out of Earth Day festivities — to fostering a stronger connection between parent and baby. “I love that I can tell when he needs to go,” Kaitlin McGreyes, a special education teacher from Queens, New York, who started her son Cesar with EC as a newborn, told DNAInfo. “And [I] have an idea of what might be bothering him.”
Proponents of EC, like Olson, point to other cultures around the world that don’t wait until age 3 to potty train. And, while it may be a messy endeavor, especially for parents and babies on-the-go in New York City, The Times says that a spokeswoman for the city’s health department didn’t call EC a health hazard — just a “general sanitation issue.” Over at Mommyish, blogger Maria Guido takes that sentiment a beat further:
“I’ve often thought about how much it must suck to be sitting in a dirty diaper – so I can understand where these parents are coming from. I’m not knocking ‘elimination communication’ as a practice. I just think it’s totally gross to have your child urinating in the street. Is that wrong of me?”
Some pediatricians criticize EC for other reasons. The Times spoke to one doctor who is “skeptical” of an infant being able to learn when he or she has to go to the bathroom. And in response to a story about 6-month-old Izabella Oniciuc, whose parents said she was completely toilet trained, pediatric urologist Dr. Steve Hodges wrote in his Huffington Post blog that the practice results in “damaging habits” for baby, namely “chronic holding … the root cause of virtually all toileting problems, including daytime pee and poop accidents, bedwetting, urinary frequency and urinary tract infections.”
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3681/muslim-family-next-door
Where are the articles by moderate Muslims condemning the prominent Muslims who beg Allah to strike infidels with cancer and disease? No practicing Muslim has openly condemned such prayers, or named the sheikhs who urge these brutalities.
The neighbors of the Chechnyan Muslim family whose sons were responsible for the Boston Marathon terror attack said they were stunned by the news and that this nice Muslim family was known for its generosity and kindness. Many Americans often ask, “What about the Muslim family next door? They are really nice people.”
Some of the nicest people I know are Muslims, but that must never blind us from understanding the risk we are taking when we allow the building of hundreds of mosques financed by Saudi Arabia, as well as millions of Muslims to migrate into America at a time of a fierce, if sophisticated, desire by Islamist groups to spread Islam throughout the world, and to radicalize impressionable youths by stoking anger against the Western nations, people and values.
The existence of nice, educated Muslims should also never blind us from seeing the deep problems within the ideology of Islam and its jihadist goals. Muslims themselves admit that Islam is more than a religion – that it is, in fact, a state, legal system and a military institution—with the goal, as one’s holy duty, of bringing Islam to the rest of the world, a desire often enshrined deep in the hearts of Muslims.
Even though our visible problem is with the Muslim jihadists, the so-called “moderate” Muslims have often been silent enablers and defenders, perhaps from inertia, misinformation or fear of reprisals against them, including death threats to them and members of their family should they speak out.
Terrorists could never be as powerful as they are without the prayers, and especially the material support, of Islamic nations, governments and people. A Muslim Egyptian friend — one of the nicest people you will ever meet — visiting in 1994, was crying in front of the television while praying for the people of Chechnya to declare independence from Russia and declare their country an Islamic State ruled by Sharia law.
The critiques of Islam by this author are never written for the purpose of condemning people; naturally, there are good and bad people in every culture. My deep concern springs from the ideology of Islam: it has had such dark implications on Islamic society, forcing many, otherwise perfectly fine people, to enact unthinkable terror, as others stand silently by. Islam is the only religion that requires its followers to kill those who do not believe in Allah, and to take revenge in the name of Allah. In the Quran, holy vengeance and retaliation are commanded for Muslims: “O ye who believe! Retaliation is prescribed for you. He who transgresseth after this will have a painful doom.” [Koran 2:178]. Or: “We shall take vengeance (Muntaquimun) upon the sinners.” [32:22] The translation of the Arabic word “Muntaquimun” meaning vengeance is often watered down in translation by using the word punishment or retribution instead.
http://bit.ly/ZEJlSX While most of the world is afflicted by an economic meltdown, Israel demonstrates fiscal responsibility, sustained economic growth with no stimulus package and a conservative, well-regulated banking system with no banking or real estate bubble. At 65, Israel’s credit rating is sustained by the three leading global credit rating companies: Standard and Poor’s (S&P), […]
The “Mysterious Motive” Cover-Up on the Boston Attack Begins
http://rubinreports.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-mysterious-motive-cover-up-on.html
Now that the two (main at least) terrorists from the Boston Marathon attack have been killed or captured we enter a new phase, the phase in which the dominant Politically Correct (but Factually Incorrect) forces try to explain away the attack.
Can this be done? Will they really try? Well, yes. True, as one of my correspondents remarked it is much easier to obfuscate far distant Benghazi than the total shutdown and horror in the middle of a major American city. Yet the spin-masters are already at work.
The first step must be, in part, a stalling technique but it sets the pattern for what is to come. As, in the words of a Reuters story, the “Boston Marathon bombing investigation turns to motive,” the motive must be obfuscated.The Reuters piece is a good start. The article spends seven paragraphs discussing the parents claim that the two brothers were framed. This suggests that the mass media and politicians will not shrink from suggesting—perhaps I should say, gives fair hearing—to bizarre conspiracy theories and doubts.
People shouldn’t believe these completely, is the theme, but you just can’t be too sure that two young Muslims would have any reason to harm Americans.
