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Pelosi: Keep tax returns for congressmen private
Congressional leaders were defiant T…
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Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz21A121gzg
Obama job council meetings 0, fundraisers 106
Politico
Thursday, July 19, 2012
Blogs
Obama job council meetings 0, fundraisers 106
Mitt Romney takes the White House to task: “We’re surprised that the president has not met with his Jobs Council in the last six months. … We took a look at his schedule and over the last six months he has done 106 fundraisers. And so, I think you learn something about the president’s priorities.” Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz21A1Bo08M
Poll: 61% say Holder in contempt of Congress
News
Fox News
by: Dana Blanton
Thursday, July 19, 2012

Poll: 61% say Holder in contempt of Congress
Attorney General Eric Holder Photo Credit:AP

A majority of American voters would have voted to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over documents about the Fast and Furious debacle.

The U.S. House of Representatives held Attorney General Holder in contempt on June 28 by a vote of 258-95.

A Fox News poll released Thursday shows 61 percent of voters nationally would have done the same thing if they were in Congress. That includes most Republicans (82 percent) and nearly half of independents (49 percent) and Democrats (48 percent).

Read more: http://times247.com/articles/poll-61-percent-say-holder-in-contempt-of-congress#ixzz21A1QMXZL
New polls show Obama vulnerable on economy
MSNBC
Thursday, July 19, 2012
News
Three new polls suggest that voters’ optimism about the state of the economy has slid, making Obama more vulnerable to efforts that seek to turn the campaign into a referendum on his economic management. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz21A1nTPDb

RUTHIE BLUM: ATTACK IN BULGARIA

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=2273

Don’t ask why Hezbollah attacked

Wednesday’s suicide bombing in Bulgaria may have been a startling reminder that Jews are not safe in the world today, but it did not come as a surprise to anyone involved in intelligence, espionage and counterterrorism. That such acts of targeted, cold-blooded killing have not been carried out on a daily basis, as they were during the Second Intifada, is due to the incredibly heroic work of our security services, not to a weakening of the will or means of our enemies.

Nor was it accidental that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately responded by pointing the finger at Iran and its chief proxy, Hezbollah. Whatever spin analysts have been trying to put on Netanyahu’s blatant and authoritative accusation, made before all the forensic facts were in, anyone paying the slightest bit of attention knows that there is a global war going on between the East and the West — with the former fast and furiously building a nuclear weapons arsenal that could blitz the latter if not into oblivion, then at least into submission.

It is being said by pundits that the purpose of Netanyahu’s statement about Israel’s not being the only entity in danger from the Iranian threat was to prepare the ground for a possible joint military operation against the Islamic republic’s nuclear facilities. This is doubtful.

DEROY MURDOCK: GREEN JOBS GONE BUST

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/309936/green-jobs-gone-bust-deroy-murdock ‘We’ll invest $15 billion a year over the next decade in renewable energy, creating five million new green jobs that pay well, can’t be outsourced, and help end our dependence on foreign oil,” candidate Barack Obama pledged in a radio address on November 1, 2008. Three years and eight months later, as unemployment has […]

PLEASE READ MICHELLE BACHMANN’S LETTER TO KEITH ELLISON

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/frontpagemag-com/michele-bachmanns-letter-to-keith-ellison/print/

Editor’s note: Below is a copy of Rep. Michele Bachmann’s letter to Rep. Keith Ellison in response to objections over the congresswoman’s concern over the Muslim Brotherhood’s penetration of the U.S. government. The letter includes a discussion of Hillary Clinton’s top aide Huma Abedin and her troubling ties to the Brotherhood.

NONIE DARWISH: HUMA ABEDIN’S MOTHER AND AN EXTREME ISLAMIST AGENDA

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/nonie-darwish/huma-abedin%e2%80%99s-mother%e2%80%99s-extreme-islamist-agenda/print/ Huma Abedin, Secretary Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff, could be the nicest woman with the greatest character, but that is not the issue nor should it be a reason to prevent ny inquiry into her family background and connection to the Muslim Brotherhood. Instead of attacking Representative Bachmann for raising important questions regarding Muslim […]

Why Don’t Rocket Attacks Against Israel Get Headlines? Giulio Meotti

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/giulio-meotti/why-dont-rocket-attacks-against-israel-get-headlines/print/ Sderot, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Beersheba….All major southern Israel cities are again under a heavy rocket offensive from Hamas-controlled Gaza. There are Jewish dead, babies wounded, schools and synagogues destroyed, cities and towns terrorized. The latest wave of rockets took place only last week. But Israel as the most heavily bombed nation in the world never […]

DANIEL GREENFIELD: OBAMA’S FOURTH WAR

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-greenfield/obama%e2%80%99s-fourth-war/ To order Daniel Greenfield’s new Freedom Center pamphlet, The Great Betrayal: Obama’s Wars and the War in Iraq, click here. Fresh off three wars, Obama is looking to dive headlong into a fourth war in Syria. Even as Islamists are wreaking havoc across Mali, enforcing Sharia law and committing atrocities using weapons looted from […]

DAVID SOLWAY: THE THREE GREAT SCAMS OF OUR TIME

http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-three-great-scams-of-our-time/

“Don’t disturb the order of the world, storyteller.”

– Mario Vargas Llosa, The Storyteller.

Corruption, delusion, and mendacity are nothing new as determinants of both personal and collective life. They are staples of human nature. But with the spread of the print and electronic media and the immediate accessibility of information at any time and any place in the “global village,” the opportunity for mass deception has become the distinguishing factor of our time. Sophistry and subterfuge have gone mainstream. The ability of dominant elites to influence and even control the thought-world of vast populations to an historically unprecedented extent is now an integral part of contemporary life.

There are, to be sure, various ancillary elements involved in the ubiquitous public hospitality to blatant fictions and professional guile, including the critical decay of education at all levels and the growing proneness to parasitical entitlements among Western electorates, accentuating the appetite for passivity and stoking what amounts to a handout mentality. A populace coddled by welfare gratuities will accept packaged ideas and doctored reports as readily as they do food stamps, tax exemptions, and government checks.

As a result, intellectual laziness has never been so widespread in a pampered and ostensibly enlightened cultural realm, providing a soft target for media disinformation and political propaganda to work their injurious will. (It must be admitted that even the dispensers of such concoctions are often under the spell of their own stupefactions.) Nothing else, it would appear, can explain the reflexive acceptance among those who should know better of the three consummate trumperies disfiguring the era in which we live: the Palestinian “narrative,” the climate change shakedown, and the ascent of Barack Obama to the most powerful office in the world. Truth is now at a discount as never before and has been increasingly replaced by promiscuous and sovereign mythologies.

U.N. : TERROR? WHAT TERROR IN BULGARIA?

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2012/07/19/UN-Watch-United-Nations-Fails-to-Call-Deadly-Attack-on-Israelis-in-Bulgaria-Terror
The Geneva-based human rights organization UN Watch has issued a press statement criticizing the UN for failing to describe yesterday’s attack on Israeli tourists in Bulgaria as “terrorism.” The attack, which Israel blamed on Iran and which claimed seven lives, marked a new escalation in the confrontation between Iran and the rest of the world, as well as the return of international terror to the security forefront. But despite the urgent nature of the issue, and the horrific nature of the attack, the UN could not bring itself to call it “terror.”

UN Watch has the details:

• A U.N. spokesperson said that Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon condemned the attack “in the strongest possible terms.” In fact, however, the U.N. chief’s choice of terms was weak in comparison to his statement two weeks ago on the bombing of churches in Kenya. In that case, Mr. Ban rightly spoke of “terrorist “attacks, “reprehensible and criminal,” saying the perpetrators “must be held to account.” Yet today he referred only to the deadly “bombing” of Israelis — noticeably declining to describe it as an act of terrorism — and he made no call for holding the perpetrators to account. UN Watch today urged Mr. Ban to clarify his position and to truly use the strongest possible terms to condemn today’s terrorist attack.

EDWARD CLINE: THE MANY APPETITES FOR CRUELTY….FROM APRIL 2012…BUT SPLENDID AND APPOSITE

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-many-appetites-for-cruelty

Daniel Greenfieldwas discussing Hitler and Stalin when he noted that they had an “appetite for cruelty.” That got me thinking about the nature and purpose of cruelty.
Hitler and Stalin (and Mao of China) murdered millions by order or by policies they knew would result in the deaths of millions. Was theirs a passionate cruelty, or a disinterested one? Hitler was certainly passionate in his hatred of Jews. Stalin, however, and his predecessor, Lenin, put their victims in an abstract equation that dehumanized those millions and spared the dictators any personal involvement.

Cruelty comes in two sizes: flaming and disinterested. They can be mixed and matched in a bewildering array of styles. All are facets of nihilism. Nihilism has meaning only if there is a good for it to erase or disfigure. It otherwise does not manifest itself. The good must be seen by a nihilist as a threat or a nemesis. Nihilism is evil. It is an evil in action.

Flaming cruelty, for example, is a Turkish or Pakistani or Somali Muslim raping, beating, maiming, and disfiguring a non-Muslim girl or woman in Europe. This also includes “honor” killings of Muslim women who flout Islamic “traditions” or “mores” or prescribed Islamic social behavior. It is a literal crime of passion, a passion for destroying the good for being the good. The offended “honor” is a self-estimate in the eyes of others. The “passion” is rooted in either a malevolent hatred of the good, or in a desperate fear of what other Muslims will think of one if one does not take “corrective” action – the destruction of a value, such as a wayward Muslim girl by her parents and relatives – to preserve one’s standing in the eyes of those others.

Disinterested cruelty is a government arm-twisting the news media into not reporting the rapes, beatings, disfigurements, and honor killings lest Muslims take exception to the fact that Muslims committed the crimes in conformance with Islamic doctrine. The rapes, beatings, disfigurements, and honor killings are not crimes in Islam’s eyes. They are expressions of conquest and dominance over an individual deemed an unbeliever or an apostate – of someone outside the collective. Islam has no moral basis. It is nihilistic to the core.