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http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/matteo-renzi-pledges-sweeping-change-in-italy-a-858162.html

Matteo Renzi is on a crusade to become Italy’s next leader. With his calls for wholesale change in the political landscape, the mayor of Florence is generating excitement like few other recent Italian politicians. But his main opposition is coming from the bigwigs in his own party who would also get the boot if he won.

Last Monday, he was in Rome. A week earlier, he ploughed through northern Italy. In just two days, he made stops in 20 cities — from Mantua and Monza to Bergamo and Brescia — logging 3,250 kilometers (over 2,000 miles) in the process. Everywhere he went, the rooms were packed and the crowds were enthusiastic. Now his journey is taking him to southern Italy, starting with Naples.

The journey is being made in a white camper with the word “Adesso!”, or “Now!”, written in big letters on the exterior. Inside sits Matteo Renzi, the 37-year-old mayor of Florence. He is confident, relatively young for an Italian politician — and sparking fear within the establishment. He is determined to win this spring’s parliamentary election on his own, to become prime minister and to lead Italy for the next five years.

The resonance has been massive. More than anyone, young, Internet-savvy Italians are excited that someone is finally sounding the call to the barricades. After all, the older generation has yoked them with unemployment and debts. Even older conservatives who used to vote for former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi are jumping on the bandwagon. Fausto, for example, a self-employed construction engineer in his mid-50s, says: “If Renzi runs, he’ll get my vote!”

Fighting the Party Elders

Many of Renzi’s supporters are former left-wing voters who had stopped voting because they were disappointed by their parties. But now they are suddenly enthusiastic again. Many have donated to his online “Fai il pieno al camper” (“Fill Up the Camper”) campaign, which collects small donations in small increments starting at €5 ($6.50) to help bankroll his tour through Italy. By mid-Wednesday, the campaign had already collected almost €33,000 in donations.

Although Renzi’s campaign website already makes it seem like he’s on a triumphal procession, his race to the top has actually just begun. Before this stylish Florence native can prepare to conquer Italy, he must first win the battle to become his party’s leading candidate. To do that, he still has to win the primaries of the center-left Democratic Party (PD), an unhappy marriage of former communists and erstwhile supporters of the Christian Democracy party, which dominated Italian postwar politics until it was destroyed by corruption trials in the early 1990s.

This first step will perhaps be the hardest — particularly because not everyone in the PD is celebrating this political dynamo out of Florence. Many find him “abnormal” and “populist,” and some even detest him. The reason for this is clear: Renzi doesn’t just want to chase Berlusconi and his followers from the halls of power. He also wants to dethrone the leaders of his own party. “People who have hunkered down in parliament for 25 to 30 years cannot make decisions about our future!” he shouted at a recent political event in a marketplace. Italy needs “new faces,” he added, including in the PD. For that reason, he urges people to “consign to the garbage heap” veteran party bigwigs, including ex-Family Minister Rosy Bindi, ex-Prime Minister Massimo D’Alema, ex-party secretary Walter Veltroni — and anyone else who comes to mind. In his eyes, they all need to go. Italians need to banish the generation of politicians that arose out of the student protest movement of the late 1960s to the history books, he says.

But the people he is referring to are determined to avoid this fate. Senior PD officials and the numerous factions within the party have worked to hammer out a deal that will see Pier Luigi Bersani, the party’s current leader, nominated as the party’s leading candidate and given the party’s blessing through a series of intraparty elections similar to presidential primaries in the United States.

For the first time in a long time, the party has a chance to become the strongest political force in the country after elections in the spring. Polls currently give the PD some 27 percent of the vote. Berlusconi’s right-wing People of Freedom (PdL) party, on the other hand, is languishing below the 20 percent mark. The Northern League, the PdL’s former coalition partner, polls at between 5 and 6 percent. And even the star of Beppo Grillo, the populist comedian turned political upstart, isn’t shining so bright anymore: The polls say he would hardly win more than 15 percent of the vote.

Given these circumstances, it is entirely possible that the PD could lead the next coalition government in Rome. If that happened, Bersani would be the prime minister, but there would of course also be choice political appointments for D’Alema, Bindi and the other members of the party brass.

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/1703/spain_may_win_the_race_to_be_the_first_european_democracy_to_fall Spanish democracy has never been tested at any time in its short history against the strain of such terrible (and worsening) social problems If one had to place bets on which European democracy will go down first, the temptation would surely be to dismiss the question out of hand. By which I do not […]

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

The most important thing that any leader needs to know about war is that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. That includes a plan of fighting bloodless wars using drones and droning speeches.
The brilliant plan that Barack Hussein Obama and some of his more useless advisers cooked up for defeating Islamic terrorism was to isolate the “extreme” violent Islamists who want to kill people from the “moderate” political Islamists who are willing to take over entire countries in elections.

The Islamist terrorists would be deprived of a meaningful reason to kill people in the name of implementing Islamic law if their political brethren got to take over entire countries and implement Islamic law. Once the Muslim Brotherhood took over a few countries, then Al Qaeda would be marginalized and irrelevant. Its operatives would soon have to drop the terrorism and get jobs teaching about LGBT rights or building solar panels.

Whoever came up with this plan probably had a grandfather in the State Department who said in 1919 that the Communists would become less dangerous to Western Europe now that they had all of Russia to use for their economic experiments because stupidity doesn’t go away. The same old ideas that cost millions of lives a few generations ago are repackaged with some artful worldplay and are parroted by the smart set as the sort of thing that should be obvious to anyone.

Islamism, now joins Communism and Nazis on the shelf of things that we don’t really have to worry about once we’ve appeased them enough, at least until they stop taking off fingers and start biting off hands and then suddenly we have to start worrying all over again.

The problem with Obama’s split Islamists maneuver is that Al Qaeda had spent more time attacking Saudi Arabia, the most Islamist Sunni country on earth, than any other Muslim country. Turning Egypt and Syria Islamist was not going to dissuade or isolate Al Qaeda. For Islamists, there is an endless well of “extremes” so that the rise of one Islamist government is just an excuse for more Islamists to arrive and denounce them as fakes and puppets of America and Israel.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/morning-jay-are-polls-tilted-toward-obama_653067.html

Republicans, by and large, are frustrated with recent polls of the presidential election because they think Democrats are being oversampled. Many pollsters respond by saying that “weighting” the polls for partisan identification creates its own problems and might end up skewing the polls in the wrong direction.

I am not in favor of partisan weighting, per se, although some polls like the Rasmussen poll do it in a sensible and nuanced way. So, I think the pollsters are offering a false choice between weighting and not weighting.

Furthermore, a lack of weighting creates its own problems, which many pollsters often fail to acknowledge. Specifically, many polls have, in my judgment, overestimated the Democrats’ standing right now. I base this conclusion not on a secret, black box statistical methodology or some crystal ball, but rather on a read of American electoral history going back to 1972. If I am right, then some of the polls are giving a false sense of the true state of the race, and will likely correct themselves at some point or another.

One important “tell” in my opinion, is this president’s continued weak position with independent voters, who remain the true swing vote.

Obama’s average overall margin over Romney in these same polls is roughly 4 percent. Bottom line: You do not get a four-point lead overall with a tie among independents, unless you are squeezing substantially more votes out of your base than your opponent is. And more generally, you are not “winning” an election in any meaningful sense of the word when 3/5ths of unaffiliated voters are either undecided or against you.

So, I see two ways the polls are tilted in favor of the president.

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/09/obamas_sequestration_imperiling_us_at_home_and_weakening_us_abroad.html Muslim nations are imploding against the looming backdrop of sequestration, the trillion-dollar budget cuts mandated by the Budget Control Act, passed by Congress last year. As of January 1, 2013, half of those cuts must come from defense, which amounts to about $600 billion over a period of ten years. American Thinker interviewed experts […]

http://pjmedia.com/blog/morsi-urges-un-to-protect-world-from-campaign-against-islamic-sanctities/?print=1 Morsi Urges UN to Protect World from ‘Campaign Against Islamic Sanctities’ Hillary Clinton sat down with the Egyptian president to thank him for providing U.S. Embassy security. The second day of the 67th United Nations General Assembly wasn’t as notable for its eighth visit — and rambling doomsday message — from Iranian President Mahmoud […]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444180004578018534242887950.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop In his United Nations speech on Tuesday, President Obama talked about the September 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya and declared that “there should be no doubt that we will be relentless in tracking down the killers and bringing them to justice.” What he didn’t say is how relentless he’ll be in […]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444813104578018383382981800.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop For years, Abu Hamza made a career out of denouncing the West—and allegedly plotting terrorist attacks against it—while living in the bosom of the British welfare state. Since his arrest in 2004, he’s had a second career of sorts: exploiting every available avenue afforded him by the criminal justice systems of the societies he […]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443819404577633511664110678.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” —George Orwell Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speaks at the United Nations today, which also happens to be Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. The timing is apt because when it comes to Iran and Israel, the hardest thing for […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-new-narrative?f=puball

The 2012 election should come down to a simple question: what is the best way to create millions of new jobs in an economy where 12 million people are unemployed, 5 million are underemployed and 6 million people have become so disillusioned they have given up looking for work altogether.

Where Are We?

We have added 3.8 million jobs in the three years and two months since the June 2009 recovery began according to the administration. That is 100,000 jobs a month, the worst recovery in 67 years.

During this recovery, the US government spent $11 trillion, 5 million people were added to the poverty roles, 14 million more people now receive food stamps, 3.5 million people were added to social security disability roles, the value of the dollar tanked, and the debt of the US went up nearly $6 trillion to $16 trillion, a greater per capita debt than Greece.

Manufacturing jobs have been lost as have jobs in energy and mining. Measured from January 2009, no net new jobs have been created. Economic growth this past quarter as been 1.5%. 150 new regulations costing more than $1 billion each are poised to cascade through the economy starting next year. Taxes are scheduled to go up by $500 billion each year for the next decade, 10 times the highest tax increase ever in US history.

The administration says “this works” and they assert we just have to do more of the same and the US economy will boom as it did under President Clinton in the 1990s.

What is wrong with this picture?

Since the election of President Reagan in 1980, the US has had three economic recoveries prior to the one we are now in. They were 1983-89, 1991-2000 and 2003-07. In that 24 year period, the US economy produced 54 million jobs in the 22 growth years or 250,000 jobs a month. Can we do this again?

Yes we can–but if we copy Reagan not Obama. Clinton in his second term copied Reagan, not Obama.

In 1983-89, what did the US government do to improve the economic climate to encourage job growth? Let us look at the record.

REAGAN

Taxes: Cut tax rates 30% on individuals; cut top rate to 28% including cutting capital gains to 20%, compared to Carter era 70% and 35% respectively.

Regulations: Have major regulatory reform of trucking, transportation, communications and energy, resulting in millions of new jobs in these economic areas.

Energy: Reduce the price of oil from $32 barrel (December 1980) to $16 barrel in 1989.

Spending: Reduced government spending as a percent of GDP by 1.5%.

Revenue: Government income increased an average of $65 billion a year.

GDP: Growth in the US economy averaged 3.9% between 1983-89.

Jobs: Job growth reached 20 million from January 1983 to January 1989 or 3.3 million a year and 11 million from 1983-5 in first three years of the recovery.