The State Department of Palestine URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/06/06/the-state-department-of-palestine/ Jerusalem has, for the last several thousand years, been the holiest city in Jerusalem. Last week, Israelis celebrated Yom Yerushalayim, Jerusalem Day – the day in 1967 when the Israel Defense Forces liberated Jerusalem from Arab rule, reuniting the city and opening its holy places to […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/
The year-long saga of the Wisconsin recall is, at long last, over, and Scott Walker is still standing. The low-key Republican governor has withstood a sustained (and expensive) onslaught from the forces of Big Labor and its allies on the Left that featured everything from the coordinated cross-border retreat of intransigent Democratic lawmakers, to the occupation of the state house by a band of radicals, bongo drummers, and high school truants, to ill-fated attempts to nullify Republican legislative majorities and pick off uncooperative judges. Walker’s enemies did everything but release the kraken.
And yet, he won. Throughout, Walker has stayed even-keeled, evincing—if not exactly cockiness, then something like the fatalism and serenity of an innocent man in the middle of a trial for his life. An equanimity, and a faith that his reforms would be embraced by Wisconsin voters, that turns out to have been fully warranted.
Walker won because his reform program is popular, and because it is working. The governor’s personal approval numbers in Wisconsin hover around 50 percent — not bad for a man who most Wisconsinites have seen Photoshopped into a Hitler mustache and Nazi regalia at least once in the last year. But more telling is the popularity of Walker’s reforms. According to one recent Reason-Rupe poll, 72 percent of Wisconsinites favor the requirement that public-sector workers increase their pension contributions to 6 percent of their salaries. And 71 percent favor making government employees pay 12 percent instead of 6 percent of their health-care premiums.
Such commonsense measures, which put public-sector employees on a more even footing with the taxpayers who pay their salaries, have already led to over $1 billion in savings across the state, saving public-sector workers from layoffs in the bargain. The reforms’ success has also neutralized them as campaign issues for Walker’s opponents, who were forced to turn away from the very raison d’être of the recall and emphasize instead a grab-bag of non-issues (Walker’s record on women’s rights?) and non-controversies (vague and discredited whispers about a pending Walker indictment and a secret college love child?) in the final weeks of the race.
Walker won because he represented the taxpayer, while his opponent represented the groups whose livelihoods depend on bilking the taxpayer. Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett served as less of an alternative than a vessel for Big Labor’s unmoored wrath. Barrett raised a mere $4 million on his own, while outside PACs did the heavy lifting — We Are Wisconsin raised more than $5.5 million in the last month alone, including seven-figure donations from AFSCME and the AFL-CIO, six-figure donations from the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, and a mere $720 from its three (that’s three) individual donors. The Left will complain that Walker outspent Barrett handily, but this is no vice considering Walker also handily outraised Barrett in individual donations, about three-quarters of which were for less than $50. It was Walker’s strength, after all, that convinced national Democrats to stop spending on a race they didn’t think they could win.
And, most of all, Scott Walker saved his job by being the adult in the room. While Democrats in Washington seem to be relying on their belief that the United States government is “too big to fail” to justify a program of taxing and spending our way out of debt, the states don’t have such a luxury. And so, across the country, in states red, blue, and purple, they have turned to men like Scott Walker — and Chris Christie, and Mitch Daniels, and others — to close structural deficits, stabilize out-of-control spending, and break the death embrace between Big Labor and Big Government. In taking this toxic partnership head on, in a state with a rich progressive history no less, Walker became its biggest target. His enemies spent a year and a half preparing to take their best shot at him. And a combined total of $100 million or so later, they missed. They missed because voters are starting to understand that governing through crisis requires someone willing to make unpopular choices, stand up to entrenched interests, and hold the line against loud and determined opposition.
Quite simply, Wisconsin voters realized that if they no longer had Scott Walker, they would have to invent him.
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http://frontpagemag.com/2012/06/06/70-years-since-we-won-the-battle-of-midway/print/
THIS WONDERFUL COLUMN REMINDS US OF THE LAST TIME AMERICA FOUGHT TO WIN……RSK
It was this week, seventy years go, that the battle of Midway – by common consent, one of the three most decisive battles of the Second World War – took place.
A great deal rode on this battle, shaped so profoundly by resourcefulness, ingenuity, sacrificial bravery, chance and unexpected turns of fate such that the battle’s outcome might have been diametrically opposite.
Fought over three days, Midway’s decisive moment actually encompassed a mere few minutes in which the fortunes of Imperial Japan and the United States it had assaulted six months earlier at Pearl Harbor were reversed. The all-conquering Japanese, who in those six months had swept through south-east Asia and the western Pacific like a juggernaut, were spectacularly brought to heel. From that day on, the path ahead would be horrific and tortuous, but Japan’s defeat was assured.
Why assured? The Japanese ambition to knock the U.S. out of the Pacific and establish a “Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” – a Japanese empire free of Western influence – always partook of lunacy: the massive industrial might of the U.S. and its ability to husband enormous resources should have foretold Prime Minister Hideki Tojo’s regime that, no matter how stunning and destructive the first, Samurai-like blow inflicted on the Americans, the U.S. would in time recover and overwhelm it with outraged and righteous might. Yet, the awareness in Tokyo of American might (Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander-in-chief of the Imperial Japanese Navy, had spent years in America and seen with his own eyes the dreaded portent of Japan’s fate contained in the gigantic factories of Detroit) only gave the spur to exaggerated Japanese reliance on knock-out blows. And the great intended knock-out blow at Pearl Harbor – which did indeed eliminate for a time the U.S. Navy’s arsenal of battleships – fatefully missed the most important targets of all: the three American aircraft carriers in the Pacific at the time: Enterprise, Lexington and Saratoga. All three were at sea when Admiral Chuichi Nagumo’s Kido Butai, the 1st Carrier Fleet, a strike force of six carriers – the Akagi, Kaga, Hiryu, Soryu, Shokaku and Zuikaku – unleashed their destructive power on December 7, 1941.
http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2012/06/why-israel-should-not-return-to-1967.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Q2lMJKEBXDA
Why Israel Should Not Return To The 1967 Borders (video)
This is a splendid video, very worth watching. Indeed, it should be viewed by all inclined to demonise Israel, for as one tour guide says on camera “This is not what the western press wishes to depict”.
Introduced by Tom Trento, the video features footage of two security checkpoints (Ramallah and TulKarm) and brief interviews with the IDF officers on duty at each.
The video shows how, in order to protect its population from terrorist violence, including sniper fire onto cars on a highway, it is “a country fenced in”.
In the words of interviewee Marc Kahlberg, who took part in the disengagement from Gaza that was undertaken in the vain expectation of peace,
“Anyone who says we need to go back to the 1967 border is making a strategical mistake”.
http://www.steynonline.com/5006/give-and-take
Some years ago in this space, I cited a famous Gerald Ford line he liked to use when trying to ingratiate himself with conservative audiences: “A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.” And I posited an alternative thesis: A government big enough to give you everything you want isn’t big enough to get you to give any of it back.
That’s what the political class of Europe’s cradle-to-grave welfare states have spent the last three years doing: trying to persuade their electorates to give some of it back. Not a lot, just a bit. In France, President Sarkozy raised the retirement age from 60 to 62. French life expectancy is 80.7, so you still get to enjoy a quarter of your entire human existence as one long holiday weekend. In Greece, where those in officially designated “hazardous” professions such as hairdressing and TV-announcing get to retire at 50, the government raised the possibility of ending the agreeable arrangement by which public-sector employees receive 14 monthly paychecks per annum. They didn’t actually do it but the mere suggestion that Greeks should, like lesser mortals, be bound by temporal reality was enough for the voters to rebel. M. Sarkozy lost to a socialist pledged to restore retirement at 60, and in Greece the government got swept aside not by its traditional opposition but by various unlovely alternatives. The Communist party got 26 seats. Syriza, a “Coalition of the Radical Left” comprising the Trotskyite “Anticapitalist Political Group,” the Maoist “Communist Organization of Greece,” the Goreist “Renewing Communist Ecological Left,” plus various splinter groups too loopy to mention wound up with 52 seats and the second-largest caucus. A month ago, a mere 4 percent of European Union citizens lived under left-wing politicians. But, after a three-year flirtation with “austerity,” the citizenry has decided that a government big enough to give you everything you want suits them just fine, and they’re not gonna give any of it back. Just keep those 14 monthly checks per annum coming (it counts for your government pension, too) until they’re dead. If it bankrupts those left behind, who cares? Not my problem.
Armed EPA Agents Visit Asheville Man http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/armed-epa-agents-visit-asheville-man?f=puball Sometimes a small incident says volumes about a large government agency. In this case, it’s the Environmental Protection Agency. Around 1:45 PM on May 23, Ashville, North Carolina resident Larry Keller was in the midst of an international call which he had to cut short in order to […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-muslim-brotherhood-charm-campaign?f=must_reads The Muslim Brotherhood charm campaign in the U.S. has officially been launched. Now that the Brotherhood is no longer an opposition group, but a political juggernaut controlling a majority of the seats in Egypt’s parliament, a series of meetings with experts in the U.S. have been organized to convince the wary that they are […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/blog/
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Wisconsin Governor Walker addresses crowd after bitter recall election
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Bill Clinton: We’re in a recession and should extend the Bush tax cuts for the rich
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Satire: NewsBusted 6/5/12A new low for the United Nations (Pat Condell)
Read more: Family Security Mattershttp://www.familysecuritymatters.org/#ixzz1x0n7GIYd
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http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/radical-islamic-organization-to-hold-conference-in-illinois-on-june-17 An Islamic extremist group called Hizb ut-Tahrir that opposes democracy and supports violent jihad, including the killing of U.S. soldiers, is coming to Rolling Meadows, Illinois on June 17. The conference, titled “Revolution: Liberation by Revelation–Muslims Marching Toward Victory” is about how Muslims must help resurrect the Caliphate and institute Sharia-based governance. The event […]
http://pjmedia.com/blog/meet-john-brennan-obamas-assassination-czar/ A relatively unnoticed article [1] by Associated Press reporter Kimberly Dozier two weeks ago outlined new Obama administration policy changes which consolidated power for authorizing drone attacks and assassinations under political appointees within the White House. The article identifies White House counterterrorism chief John Brennan as the official assuming the role of Obama’s de […]
