http://yidwithlid.blogspot.com Holy Cow! I Agree With Ron Paul, Trump-Moderated Debate is a Circus Regular readers of this site are about read something you thought you would never find in anything written by me, but I agree with Ron Paul. In fact this time the Texas Congressman the has shown more courage than Michele Bachmann, Rick […]
Egypt’s Sham Election The military helps the Islamists to power.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/print/284962
According to Egypt’s elections committee, the Muslim Brotherhood won 37 percent of the vote of the first round of voting in Egypt, and the Salafis, who promote a yet more extreme Islamist program, won 24 percent, giving them together a jaw-dropping 61 percent of the vote.
This stunning result prompts two questions: Is this a legitimate or rigged outcome? Are Islamists about to dominate Egypt?
Legitimate or rigged? No one took seriously Soviet elections with their inevitable 99 percent returns for the Communists, and, while the process and outcome of the Egyptian elections are less blatant, they deserve similar skepticism. The game is more subtle, but it’s still a game, and here is how it’s played:
The Muslim Brotherhood (founded in 1928) and the military dictatorship (ruling Egypt since 1952) have a parallel ideology and a long history that makes them simultaneously rivals and allies. Over the decades, they off-and-on cooperated in an autocratic system bound by Islamic law (Sharia) and in oppressing liberal, secular elements.
In this spirit, Anwar El-Sadat, Hosni Mubarak, and now Mohamed Tantawi tactically empowered Islamists as a foil to gain Western support, arms, and money. For example, when George W. Bush pressured Mubarak to permit more political participation, the latter responded by having 88 Muslim Brotherhood members elected to parliament, thereby warning Washington that democracy means an Islamist takeover. The apparent weakness of non-Islamists scared the West from further insisting on a transition to political participation. But a close look at the 2005 elections finds that the regime helped the Islamists gain its 20 percent of the seats.
Published on The Weekly Standard (http://www.weeklystandard.com)
Friends Indeed How and why the Jews have thrived in England.
In the last words of this book, the author quotes her brother Milton Himmelfarb in one of his last essays: “Hope is a Jewish virtue.” Nobody embodies that virtue more felicitously than Gertrude Himmelfarb, who over a long and fruitful life of scholarship has given hope to all who have encountered her, whether in person or in print.
Some 60 years have elapsed since her first book appeared: Lord Acton: A Study in Conscience and Politics. There she praised her noble subject for having taken “the idea of conscience out of the reign of metaphysics and placed it within the province of politics,” thereby giving his readers grounds for hope in the face of the pessimistic dictum for which he is chiefly remembered: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Like Acton and the other great Victorians to whose study Himmelfarb has devoted so much of her life, she is a “liberal with a difference”—a liberal, that is, who takes seriously humanity’s capacity to inspire despair. Such liberals are nowadays invariably seen as conservatives by the socialists who have usurped the term “liberal.” But like her late husband Irving Kristol, she is also a “conservative with a difference”—a conservative, that is, who takes seriously humanity’s capacity to inspire hope.
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.10973/pub_detail.asp At last, I’ve arrived. Michael Mann, inventor of the Hockey Stick, has written to the Wall Street Journal branding me a “denier” and a “contrarian” and “silly.” These are badges of honour I shall wear with pride. The letter is interesting for lots of reasons, not least its grotesque hypocrisy. “In recent years”, he […]
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards prepare for war [TELEGRAPH] North Korea making missile able to hit U.S. – Republicans press Pentagon for long-range interceptors [WT] Obama offered his condolences and said deaths of 24 Pakistani troops were ‘regrettable’ but accidental [THE GUARDIAN] A dubious death in Dubai: Emirate police and U.S. officials tight-lipped over Iranian expat’s ‘suicide’ […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.10974/pub_detail.asp The U.S. Central Command has a new rapid-response team which uses information, rather than weapons, to combat terrorism, the New York Times recently reported. Hunting down conspiracy theories and bogus reports on Middle East websites, media outlets and in the social media sphere, the Digital Engagement Team works at “containing lies, misinformation or just […]
The Winter of Our Economic Discontent
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
What do the United States, Russia and the Middle East have in common? They all have unpopular regimes run by out of touch kleptocrats who faced popular uprisings. The opposition groups in all those place don’t have much in common, but the governments do.
Obama might have sneered at Mubarak or Putin, but for all the pretense of democracy he was sitting at the top of his own kleptocracy, doling out fortunes to supporters out of the emergency bailout and stimulus plans. The Tea Party was the outraged and vocal response of a working middle-class that was seeing its taxes and its children’s future being squandered to feed the appetites of the oligarchy.
The media elite might bemoan the Tea Party as the second coming of the Klu Klax Klan, but it was a far more honest expression of economic discontent than OWS, which limited its manufactured anger to the junior partners in the kleptocracy, while giving the men in power a pass.
Gunwalker: Friday ‘Document Dump’ Reveals Justice Dept. Misled Congress Posted By Patrick Richardson
URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/blog/gunwalker-friday-document-dump-reveals-justice-dept-misled-congress/
On Friday, the Justice Department released nearly 1,400 pages of documents related to Operation Fast and Furious, which allowed more than 2,000 guns to “walk” into the hands of Mexican drug cartels. (The “Friday document dump” is a tactic used to keep controversial issues from dominating the news cycle during the week.)
According to the Associated [1] Press [1]:
[The Justice Department] provided Congress with documents detailing how department officials gave inaccurate information to a U.S. senator in the controversy surrounding Operation Fast and Furious, the flawed law enforcement initiative aimed at dismantling major arms trafficking networks on the Southwest border.
Note that AP refers to the Operation simply as being “flawed,” and as being a legitimate attempt to disrupt arms trafficking.
The most notable information in the release: DOJ is now taking the unusual step of withdrawing a letter it had sent to Congress, admitting the letter contained “inaccurate” information.” NPR reports:
Under fire for losing track of weapons that turned up at crime scenes along the Southwest border, the Justice Department has taken the extraordinary step of formally withdrawing an inaccurate letter about the episode that it sent to Congress earlier this year.
Outrage over Israeli “come home” ads is a sad reflection on American Jewish life Posted By David P. Goldman URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2011/12/05/outrage-over-israeli-come-home-ads/ Why did the mainstream American Jewish organizations react so angrily to Israeli government advertisements urging expatriates in America to come home? In a “Spengler” essay at Asia Times Online today, I observe […]
http://pjmedia.com/blog/gingrich-plan-on-immigration-a-good-starting-point/
SO IS THE PERRY PLAN AND HE WAS SCALDED …..YOU CAN’T JUST HIDE BEHIND “SECURE OUR BORDERS”….THAT’S PIETY WITHOUT PLANS….NATIONAL ID CARDS, WORKER VISAS….ARE PART OF THE ANSWER AND THE CRITICAL QUESTION WILL BE USING “PROFILING” IN IMMIGRATION LAWS…..RSK
Gingrich Plan on Immigration a Good Starting Point
In a bold move that enraged folks on both the right and the left, Newt Gingrich recently proposed [1] “a path to legality for those people whose ties are so deeply into America that it would truly be tragic to try to rip their family apart.”
Rest easy. As Gingrich has since attempted to make clear to groups of conservative voters, he would create such a path only after accomplishing a half dozen other objectives on the immigration front. On that menu, you’ll find plenty red meat for the Republican base: withholding federal funds from “sanctuary cities” that prohibit local police from enforcing immigration law; building a fence along the U.S.-Mexico border with Mexico; making English the official language of the country; and requiring from immigrants an understanding of American history and how it relates to U.S. citizenship; and speeding up deportations of illegal immigrants who haven’t been in the country long enough to qualify for leniency.
Nevertheless, Gingrich said, it’s time for Americans to have “an honest conversation about what we are going to do about the people who are already here.” Most of those folks should be deported, he insisted. But there would be an exception for longtime residents with families and deep roots in the community. Workers would get “red cards” to identify them as having the right to work legally in the United States, but they wouldn’t get U.S. citizenship as part of the deal.
I like what Gingrich has in mind, and I consider it a step in the right direction. It’s certainly a big improvement over what’s happening now, with Congress afraid to even broach the subject and President Obama having deported more people in a three-year period than any president since Dwight Eisenhower.
