http://www.prudenpolitics.com/index.php/pruden/full_column/obama_is_how_you_spell_relief
“In fact, the only way Mr. Obama can make mediocre economic news look good, observes Investors Business Daily, is to set expectations “so low that even a tiny step forward seems like a giant leap.” That’s not much of a strategy.”
Conservatives are fractured, split and mad at each other, brawling like Democrats. There’s only one man who can unify the movement. Fortunately for the Grumpy Old Party, Barack Obama is available, ready and eager.
By mid-March, we’ll have muddled through most of the primaries and caucuses (cauci?), and by then the Republicans will know who their nominee will be, even if he won’t be crowned until the party meets in convention assembled in Tampa in late August.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/151565
PA TV Marks Fatah Founding, Praises Coastal Road Massacre
The Palestinian Authority has again praised the perpetrator of the worst terrorist attack in Israeli history, the Coastal Road Massacre.
The Palestinian Authority has again praised the perpetrator of the worst terrorist attack in Israeli history, this time during television broadcasts to mark the 47th anniversary of the Fatah faction.
The videos were broadcast over PA TV (Fatah) on December 30 and 31, 2011 and January 1, 2, and 4, 2012.
In 1978, Dalal Mughrabi led a terrorist cell in hijacking a tourist bus and murdering 37 Israeli civilians, including 13 children. The operation, which later became known as the Coastal Road Massacre, is regularly glorified on official PA TV, with broadcasts of two music videos honoring the terrorists — in particular, Dalal Mughrabi.
\
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0112/cia_spy_on_iran.php3
A serious split is developing within Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guard, with one faction favoring the overthrow of the dictatorial regime. This presents a window of opportunity for the West to support regime change before the Islamic Republic successfully tests nuclear weapons. Once the regime has those nuclear bombs, that opening will be much narrower.
Iran has tried hard to show strength in the face of sanctions aimed at pressuring Tehran to quit its suspected nuclear-bomb and missile development programs. Iranian leaders are now flexing their military muscles in the strategic waterway, the Strait of Hormuz, threatening to shut it down and choking off a major part of the world’s oil supply.
The regime has long tried to scare the West from taking any action against it, by threatening the world’s security and stability. However, behind its mask of strength and unity, big cracks are beginning to show.
http://spectator.org/archives/2012/01/09/what-are-you-prepared-to-do
How far will congressional Republicans retreat to avoid a confrontation with Barack Obama?
“We now know Obama is willing to exercise unconstitutional power. The only unanswered question is whether congressional Republicans can rediscover their courage and push back.Since the Nixon administration, whenever a Republican president tried to exercise his constitutional powers, the Democrats and their amen chorus in the media have been in full cry about the dangers of the “imperial presidency.” Now we really have one and they are, predictably, compliant.It’s up to the Republican leaders in the House and Senate to restrain our imperious president. What, gentlemen, are you prepared to do?”
President Obama has made clear his path to re-election. He plans to run against Congress and — by seizing unconstitutional powers — go about governing this year with or without the legislative action required by the Constitution. He’ll issue executive orders, have his bureaucracy regulate as may please his ideology, and generally do whatever else he can get away with.
Obama apparently thinks he can get away with a lot, and judging by the response of the Republican congressional leaders to his actions last week, he’s probably right.
Did Bill Clinton run a surplus? Plus: Our Titanic Moment Posted By Roger Kimball
URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2012/01/09/did-bill-clinton-run-a-surplus-plus-our-titanic-moment/
The stars must be aligned to foist the constellation anaticula into the Zeitgeist: for the Duck, otherwise known as “the canard” casts its ghoulish light over our sublunary world. Four times in the past week someone has written to inform me that (I pick one formulation of the falsum anaticula) “when Bill Clinton left office there was a government surplus, it was the Bush administration that turned that into a deficit . . .”
This is a canard one hears almost as frequently as this election- year staple: that Newt Gingrich, heinous fellow, asked a former wife for a divorce while she languished in hospital, dying of cancer. What a terrible man, eh? Except that the story isn’t true, as even the most cursory research (e.g., The Gingrich Divorce Myth [1]) would show.
But research, even the cursory sort, isn’t as much fun as simple repetition, especially when there’s a reputation to ruin, smugness to be enjoyed, or a political point to score.
So it is with “Clinton delivered a surplus to George Bush in 2000” canard. You can discover this by going to the monthly statements [2] published by the U.S. Treasury. “But wait,” you say, “that chart linked shows a surplus of more than $200 billion! It’s right there in black-and-white: $236 billion and the word ‘surplus.’ So there.”
Not quite “there,” actually. That $236 billion is only one part of a larger puzzle, the bottom line of which is the total national debt, which grew every year under Clinton. Talk of a “surplus” is possible only because of accounting legerdemain. The economist Craig Steiner has put the case more clearly than anyone I know in a series of articles: “The Myth of the Clinton Surplus [3],” “The Myth of the Clinton Surplus, Part II [4],” and “The True Federal Deficit [5].” In the second article, Mr. Steiner casts his beady eye upon that $236 billion and explains how the national debt is calculated:
http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/1994/Operation-Enduring-and-Unexamined-Dementia-Contd.aspx
US Army and Afghan Army play volleyball in southwestern Kandahar in 2011. On Sunday, a similar match in Zabul province turned deadly when an Afghan Army member shot and killed one American, wounding three.
It would be most helpful for at least one of the GOP candidates to think long and hard about what is going wrong with the Bush-Obama Afghanistan War and share his thoughts with his fellow citizens. A good place to start would be with examining — noticing — the serial murders of ISAF soldiers by Afghan Army members, particularly given the fact that the Bush-Obama strategy is to train the Afghan security forces (at exhorbitant US taxpayer cost) as the supporting pillar of our so-called Exit Strategy. As George W. Bush used to say about Iraq, as they stand up, we stand down. And that worked out so well.
In the last three months the murder count in five separate attacks by uniformed Afghan security forces inside the wire includes:
Three Australian Diggers killed and ten wounded; four non-specified NATO troops wounded; two members of France’s elite 2nd Foreign Parachute Regiment killed; and, most recently, one US soldier killed and three wounded–while playing volleyball.
Excluding the Australian losses, the remaining attacks occurred in the past three weeks.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203513604577140671297550142.html?KEYWORDS=WILLIAM+SHAWCROSS Legal proceedings against violent extremists are a crucial defense of our civilization, writes William Shawcross, whose father was a prosecutor at Nuremberg. Expect to hear a lot about Nuremberg in the months ahead. The war-crimes trials of leading Nazis, begun in that German city in 1945, will form an important subtext as we approach […]
http://www.meforum.org/3134/turkey-economic-miracle UPDATE
Among all the dumb things said about the so-called Arab Spring last year, perhaps the dumbest was the idea that the new democracies of the Arab world might follow the Turkish model.
In fact, if you had invested in the Turkish model (that is, in the Turkish stock market) at the outbreak of the Arab revolts, you would have lost about half your money. If you leave your money in Turkey, you probably will lose the rest of it. Turkey is not a model. It is a bubble, and it is bursting, starting with the stock market and national currency.
Full disclosure: I shorted the Turkish market after I published my obituary for the country’s economic boom (see “Instant Obsolescence of the Turkish model”, Asia Times Online, August
10, 2011). And I was denounced as a Zionist plotter in the Turkish media. As a matter of record, I wish to state that I am shorting Turkey not for any political motivation, but only because the Turkish government’s economic policy is a clown show. I make a point, however, of contributing some of the profits to Zionist causes.
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/09/obama-terrorism-advisors-book-confuses-distorts/ Reading CDR Youssef Aboul-Enein’s book, Militant Islamist Ideology: Understanding the Global Threat, published by the Naval Institute Press (2010), one can see why U.S. leadership is far from “understanding the global threat”; why the Obama administration is supportive of the Muslim Brotherhood; and why so many U.S. politicians rose up in condemnation when one obscure pastor threatened […]
All-American Failure Posted By Daniel Greenfield
URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/09/all-american-failure/
As the eighth and final episode of “All-American Muslim” airs and the series wraps up, it does so as a failure. Last week’s 9/11 episode once again failed to appear on the Cable 100 rankings. Viewers were willing to tune in an hour earlier to TLC’s “Hoarding: Buried Alive,” but they changed the channel to anything and everything when it was time for “All-American Muslim.”
What were viewers willing to endure rather than experience the Shiite version of the Jersey Shore? They tuned in to National Geographic’s “Alaska State Troopers,” Tru TV’s “Lizard Lick Towing” and Animal Planet’s “Finding Bigfoot,” but you couldn’t get them to watch “All-American Muslim.” Which just goes to show that we’re a nation of Islamophobes. Or that even people with bad taste in television have standards.
The dirty little liberal secret is that progressives don’t watch “All-American Muslim” either. The show only exists as an Islamophobia talking point. Every time an advertiser drops it in favor of “Finding Bigfoot,” the progressives crow that once again they have proven that we are a nation that hates Muslims and loves Bigfoot.
