http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-politicians-war-on-science/?print=1 As Paula Bolyard noted [1] the other day, the “gotcha” game by the Democratic operatives with bylines to poison Republican candidates’ chances started early, with a loaded question to Marco Rubio: To read some of the reactions to Senator Marco Rubio’s comments on the age of the earth, you’d think that he’d proposed rounding […]
‘The Killing Has to Stop’ A Visit to the Home of Former Hostage Gilad Shalit By Dieter Bednarz
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/former-hostage-gilad-shalit-and-his-father-on-israel-conflict-with-gaza-a-869381-druck.html
PURE EVIDENCE HERE OF HOW A HOSTAGE AND HIS FAMILY THEN IDENTIFY WITH THE GOALS OF THE TERRORIST CAPTORS….AND TO HINK HOW MANY TERRORISTS WERE SET FREE IN ORDER TO GAIN THE RELEASE FO GILAD SHALIT…..RSK
Gilad Shalit, who spent more than five years in the hands of Hamas kidnappers, harbors no thoughts of revenge toward the Islamist group. And his father, who is beginning a political career, says that Israel needs to negotiate.
The hero of Gaza, as they called him, must be a late sleeper. The sun has already been shining for hours over the Mediterranean, shimmering in the distance, but still there is no movement on the second floor of the house in Galilee, where the shutters haven’t been opened yet. “Gilad, we have company,” Noam Shalit, 57, calls up to the second floor.
Smiling shyly, his son walks down a short flight of stairs into the kitchen, wearing a blue sweatshirt, jeans and sandals. Gilad Shalit, 26, a lanky young man with a soft handshake, is the most famous victim of Hamas since the radical Islamist group began fighting Israel, which it calls the “Zionist entity.” In June 2006, Hamas fighters attacked his army post, which was guarding the border to the Gaza Strip at the time, and kidnapped Shalit. On Oct. 18 of last year, after spending five years as a hostage, Shalit was released in exchange for 1,027 Palestinians in Israeli prisons.
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/fatal-flaws-in-the-reliance-upon-international-guarantees?f=puball When an earlier Secretary of State before Hillary Clinton, namely Condoleezza Rice, arrived several times in Jerusalem she pressured the then weak and embattled Israeli government of Ehud Olmert into continuing the dreary and one sided exercise of concessions to the Palestinian Arabs. The futile peace process, which has now existed through successive US […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/war-peace-and-wishful-thinking In one Seinfeld episode, Elaine Benes, the irrepressibly liberal camp follower, promiscuous skank, and social climber – and small screen progenitor of Sandra Fluke – remarks with reckless abandon and shameless gaucheness to a Leo Tolstoy scholar: “Although one wonders if War and Peace would have been as highly acclaimed as it was, had […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/a-warning-to-president-obama-and-ali-khamenei It is worse than appeasement to negotiate a “deal” with the Islamic theocrats in the occupied Iran, because any deal struck with these mullahs is only another ruse for them to further their plans. The UN resolutions are nothing more than pieces of paper good for burning, they can pass them all they want, […]
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
“Limited government deriving from individual freedom is the only thing that lifts democracy above the violence of the mob. The Muslim world never had that and so its experiments with democracy were doomed to be nothing more than a baton being passed from one form of tyranny to another. More tragically, the United States which once had it is losing both the limited government and the individual freedom. And that means that democracy in America is bound to follow the same path as in the Muslim world, where democracy becomes only another way of taking over a country.”
It would be tempting to attribute the disaster spreading across the Middle East to a brief flirtation with democracy snake oil, but for the better part of the last century the political class of the United States could talk of nothing else. Nearly every war was fought was to spread democracy, protect democracy or worship at the altar of democracy.
For much of the 20th Century it was the working assumption of the sort of men who got up to give speeches in crowded halls that it was democracy that made America special. But it is not so much that democracy made America special, as America made democracy special and workable. And that is because democracy only works when government is limited. When government power isn’t limited, then democracy is just tyranny with a popular vote behind it.
In a poignant historical irony, American democracy went into a prolonged decline just as its political class was busy speechifying about the importance of exporting it abroad. Government authority was increasingly centralized and elections began to come down not to ideas, but to divided groups fighting it out in a zero sum struggle for total control of each other’s lives. American democracy has been exported to Iraq. And Iraqi democracy was exported to America.
With unlimited authority vested in the government, we no longer have elections to decide policy, but to determine whether an oppressive social and cultural agenda complete with a loss of civil rights will be forced on the rest of the country. And our last election was as polarized as an Iraqi election and with a similar outcome.
Democracy was never the solution for the Middle East; a region that is properly multicultural in the sense of being a collection of quarreling tribes, religious factions and ethnic groups. And all that democracy accomplished was to give the majority another tool for oppressing the minority. Instead of bloody revolts leading to dictatorships, there were bloody revolts leading to elections which then led to dictatorships. And only a fool or Thomas Friedman would consider the addition of this extra step to be any kind of improvement.
http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2012/11/27/iran-may-be-close-to-a-plutonium-bomb-german-defense-experts-warn/?print=1 Iran might be “on the verge of producing weapon-quality plutonium,” Germany’s daily Die Welt reported Nov. 26. Hans Rühle, a former top official in the German defense ministry and foreign editor Clemens Wergin cite clues pointing to an Iranian crash program to build a plutonium bomb in the just-released International Atomic Energy Agency report […]
Protester Dies: When Is a Dictator Not a Dictator? Never The recent Hamas-Israel confrontation ended abruptly when U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced last Wednesday, November 21, a ceasefire that essentially put the relatively new, largely unknown Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi in the role of peacekeeper for Israel and Gaza. “Egypt’s new government is […]
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2012/11/27/diagram-suggests-iran-working-on-explosive-more-than-triple-force-hiroshima/ VIENNA – Iranian scientists have run computer simulations for a nuclear weapon that would produce more than triple the explosive force of the World War II bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, according to a diagram obtained by The Associated Press. The diagram was leaked by officials from a country critical of Iran’s atomic program to […]
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/28/us/politics/after-benghazi-meeting-3-republicans-say-concerns-grow-over-rice.html?hp
Rice Concedes Error on Libya; G.O.P. Digs In By MARK LANDLER and JEREMY W. PETERS
WASHINGTON — Susan E. Rice may have hoped that paying a conciliatory call on three hostile Senate Republicans on Tuesday would smooth over a festering dispute about the deadly attack on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, and clear a roadblock to her nomination as secretary of state.But the senators seemed anything but mollified, signaling instead that they would still oppose Ms. Rice, the ambassador to the United Nations, if she is nominated by President Obama, even after she conceded errors in the account of the assault she gave on Sunday morning television programs shortly after it occurred in September.
Two of the Republicans, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, said they would seek to block Ms. Rice, who according to administration officials remains Mr. Obama’s preferred choice to succeed Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. The third Republican, Senator John McCain of Arizona, said on Fox that he would be “very hard-pressed” to support Ms. Rice.
“Bottom line, I’m more disturbed than I was before,” Mr. Graham said after the tense, closed-door meeting.
The continued criticism of Ms. Rice, 48, a diplomat with close ties to Mr. Obama, deepens an already bitter and unusually personal feud between the White House and Republicans over Libya. Responding to a question about criticism of Ms. Rice at a news conference two weeks ago, Mr. Obama said, “If Senator McCain and Senator Graham and others want to go after somebody, they should go after me.”
