[Actually, the worlds largest Christian nation, and second largest Jewish nation behind only Israel. Must have been lost in translation]
image toon 1st fnn gwot islm israel = Oby = US large muslim nation after 100 others
Monday, June 8, 2009
What Muslim World?
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Even before U.S. President Barack Obama uttered a word of his long-anticipated June 4 address to "the Muslim world," there was already a problem with the rhetoric. As well meaning as it sounds, the term "Muslim world" is a trap.
There is no unified Muslim world. And describing it as such legitimizes the idea that it is "us vs. them" -- just the sort of divided world that al Qaeda wants to create...
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Does Obama Scare Osama?
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"A double blast from al Qaeda against Barack Obama shows the group is as worried as ever by the persuasive skills of the U.S. president, who makes a speech to Muslims on Thursday," Reuters "reports" from London:
Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, in an audio recording aired on Wednesday by Al Jazeera television, said Obama had planted the seeds of "revenge and hatred" towards the United States in the Muslim world and he warned Americans to prepare for the consequences.
A day earlier, the militant network's second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahri urged Egyptians not to be seduced by Obama's 'polished words' when he makes a major address in Cairo seeking to repair ties with the Muslim world.
When we read this, we suspected bias. After all, al Qaeda often attacked George W. Bush, but did Reuters portray this as a sign of the American president's strength and bin Laden's fear of his "persuasive skills"?
Then again, would it really be worth our time to comb through the archives in order to prove something so obvious--to answer what is essentially a rhetorical question?
Fortunately, we didn't have to! Reuters confirmed our suspicion in the next paragraph of this very dispatch:
For some, al Qaeda's concerted attempt to upstage Obama is a propaganda own goal that shows its normally media-savvy operatives in disarray following the departure of Obama's predecessor George W. Bush. They found Bush easy to stereotype as a belligerent, Muslim-hating cowboy.
This is a good opportunity to remind readers of one of Taranto's Laws of Journalism: When it appears in a news story, the word 'some' is a first-person pronoun.
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The Real Saudi Bow
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When President Obama first met the Saudi royals, he seemed to bow at the waist. Either that or he doubled over in pain. Did he bow? Or didn't he bow? That was the topic du jour at the press briefing that day.
But now we have the answer: Obama is, indeed, really bowing to the Saudis as he visits the Middle East this week.
First, he is bypassing Israel. Visiting the Middle East and not going to Israel would be like touring North America and omitting a stop in the United States. It only makes sense if you interpret it as a deliberate slap in the face of Jerusalem and a statement to the Arab world that America's pro-Israeli policy is changing.
But as he goes to Saudi Arabia, the United States State Department, headed by Mrs. Hillary Clinton, has announced that it has accepted the ground rules for media coverage of the Obama visit to the royal family and its domain. Reporters will only be allowed to cover the actual meetings between the Saudis and Obama and will not be permitted to visit the rest of the country or report on anything else they see during the trip. Those reporters who violate these terms are subject to arrest and imprisonment by the Saudi government!!
Hillary and Obama accepted these terms.
Since when does the U.S. government act as the assistant to the Saudi monarchy in charge of controlling the media? And since when would an American president permit this shackling of the media and still proceed with the diplomatic visit without a murmur of protest?
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The Grand Apology Tour
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As the Grand Apology Tour swept into Saudi Arabia, the al Qaeda terror chieftain released yet another audiotaped diatribe, condemning "U.S. aggression" in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Though Mr. Obama's carefully scripted "grand gesture" before a thoroughly screened audience in Cairo was simultaneously translated into a half-dozen tongues and broadcast around the world, it wasn't enough to push the bin Laden commentary off Islamic Web sites...
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“No You Can’t!”
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North Korea is launching missiles, Iran is building nukes, Saudi Arabia is sponsoring hate that translates into worldwide terrorism, Sudan is still massacring and raping, China is busy ethnic cleansing Tibet into a Chinese province… but the Obama Administration is furious, yes “furious” at only one country, Israel.
What did Israel do? Well it’s building a hotel in Jerusalem... [snip]
What right does Israel have building a hotel in its own capital anyway? So far we’ve had Secretary of State Hillary Clinton demand an end to Jewish babies being born, as if she were Pharaoh dressed up in a power suit. The administration has demanded an absolute freeze on settlements, with Jerusalem to be viewed as a “settlement” too, in exchange for Abbas and Hamas, maybe sorta stepping up their security cooperation. The double standard here is stunning (or should be).
The Muslim world can build nukes (Iran), commit genocide (Sudan), occupy anyplace they want including the territory of a NATO ally (Turkey), and Obama will come hat in hand to them, bearing apologies and huge aid packages.
Israel however had better not even think of building a hotel in its capital city. Or having babies. Or the Obama Administration will be furious and leak supposed plans to “punish” Israel for having the temerity to keep on living, building and growing.
After 17 years of terror, Israelis went to the polls and voted for security. They did not vote for a two state solution. They did not vote to be Obama’s pinata, or to be thrown under the bus whenever Obama tries to play up to the Muslim world.
[Highly Recommended > ]
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Litvinenko suspect given key security role
Moscow - The Russian businessman accused of killing Alexander Litvinenko, the former KGB agent poisoned in London in November 2006, has been given a key role in shaping his country’s security policy.
Andrei Lugovoi, who is wanted by Scotland Yard on suspicion of lacing Litvinenko’s tea with radioactive polonium 210, has been appointed to the security committee of the Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament...
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Will denying Kim cognac have any effect on NKorea?
Seoul, South Korea -- The first time North Korea tested a nuclear device, the United Nations tried to hit the reclusive nation's leader where it really hurts - in the stomach.
The global body slapped North Korea with a ban on luxury goods...
[The man has exported entire nuclear plants to Syria - but the UN doesn't think he can smuggle in a bottle of booze? And some people take the organization seriously.]
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Europe leans right as voters choose EU Parliament
Brussels - Europe leaned to the right Sunday as tens of millions of people voted in European Parliament elections, with conservative parties leading or favored in many countries amid a global economic crisis.
Opinion surveys and exit polls showed right-leaning governments edging the opposition in Germany, Italy, France, Belgium and elsewhere.
Conservative opposition parties were tied or ahead in Britain, Spain and some smaller countries...
[There, like here, their press and politicians are not the people - don't pay them much mind: this is popular European sentiment - and a continuation of the move to the right that began as a result of Bush's leadership after 9/11...]
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Obama's man called shots on bankruptcy
By the evening of April 29, with their historic bankruptcy filing hours away, Chrysler Chairman Bob Nardelli and other company leaders were left with no doubt that Steven Rattner was calling the shots.
The president wants major surgery on Detroit's auto industry, and Rattner is running the operating room.
Not since President Harry S. Truman seized the American steel industry in 1952 has America seen such a bold abuse of federal power...
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Stopping Government Motors
President Obama's decision to seize General Motors and convert it into Government Motors is as shocking as it is unpopular. Polling shows, like the president's stubborn insistence that Gitmo be closed and its terrorist prisoners brought stateside, the president's insistence that GM be nationalized is appalling to large majorities of Americans.
The socialization of America's biggest brand is not the sort of decision that can be cloaked in head-faking rhetoric. What had been a private company on the verge of bankruptcy is now a government actor competing against private sector companies and using the federal treasury as an enormous unfair advantage in the marketplace.
Most Americans cannot believe that the shareholders and bondholders of a once great company have been stripped of their equity while the unions that helped bring the company down, escape nearly unscathed.
Almost everyone grasps immediately the deep unfairness to Ford and even the offshore carmakers that now compete against the massive subsidies of the federal government. How exactly is Ford supposed to bear its 'legacy costs' while GM is relieved of its past mistakes?
Even if the cost itself was not so staggering, the idea of the federal government declaring itself on the side of one of many competitors is as distasteful as it is unprecedented.
It must be reversed. President Obama has made an enormous, unprecedented grab for power, and fair-minded Democrats should join with Republicans to reverse it, and quickly...
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The Failure of Obamanomics
The data is in for April. Here's what happened:
1. Household personal income (inflation adjusted) rose, but every penny -- and then some -- went into savings or paying down debts. Consumer spending, on which Barack Obama is betting to stimulate the economy, actually fell. None of the stimulus money was sent. None
2. Meanwhile, to pay for this stimulus spending that didn't stimulate, Obama had to borrow so much money that long-term interest rates have almost doubled since he took office, forcing postponement or abandonment of business expansion and hiring across the board.
What a record. Here are the details...
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Obamanomics: How Stupid Do They Think We Are?
Watching Fox News Sunday, I caught a panel on which Obama economic advisor Austin Goolsbee conceded that the administration had previously predicted unemployment would top out at around 8%, that it was now up to 9.4%, and that double-digit unemployment was a distinct possibility in the near future. Goolsbee then spun last month's loss of 345,000 jobs as somehow good news because it beat predictions (I don't recall him saying whose) of even more dire loss numbers.
It made me wonder why, if those predictions either existed or were serious, the Obama administration would have previously predicted that unemployment would top out at 8%?
If that weren't enough to make your head spin, Goolsbee also blamed Obama's handling (i.e., nationalizing) of the auto industry on ... President Bush. Obama, you see, was saddled with this mess because Bush — over the objections of his own party — decided back in December to raid billions in public money intended for bailing out the financial sector in order to bail out the automakers.
Again, how stupid does he think we are? Bush's move came after then President-elect Obama implored him to take action to stave off the collapse of the auto-industry. This was one of the major topics of their meeting in the White House on November 11, covered here by the Wall Street Journal...
[Normally it's the press' job to catch & report such blatant inconsistencies from our elected employees...]
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Recall the Stimulus
by Lawrence Kudlow
This week, German Chancellor Angela Merkel launched a broadside against the Fed, saying she views the Fed's powers "with great skepticism." It was an important rebuke. Here's the elected leader of a major country actually telling a central bank to stop the printing presses and avoid creating yet another inflationary bubble during the next recovery cycle. In other words, it's the printing presses, stupid.
This monetary explosion explains what's really driving the dollar down and Treasury rates up (alongside rising gold and oil prices). It's not huge budget deficits, but the growing fear that a less-than-independent Fed will keep pushing new money into the financial system in order to fund Obama's liberal spending policies.
But when you talk to traders and economists, the whisper story is that Bernanke and the Fed are no longer truly independent of the Obama White House and Treasury... [snip]
Policy analyst Dan Clifton tells me that the $200 billion spending increase scheduled for 2011 to 2019 should definitely be rolled back from the Obama stimulus package, before it's built into the current-services spending baseline. And let's not forget that the Obama Democrats already passed a $400 billion omnibus spending bill for 2009. So anybody in Washington who is serious about spending and deficits can save hundreds of billions of dollars by rolling back the stimulus package and TARP. The financial system is healing, and banks want to pay TARP down anyway.
Here's the moral of this story: Excessive Fed pump-priming and over-the-top federal spending is what matters, not the budget deficit. If we keep paying people not to work by piling on more transfer payments and government subsidies, economic growth will suffer mightily. And if the Fed keeps buying bonds issued by Uncle Sam, inflation will ratchet higher.
On the eve of recovery, with all this prior spending, why on earth do we need more? Roll back the unnecessary stimulus, and restore the Fed's independence.
[Highly Recommended > ]
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The Facts about Air Pollution from Coal-Fired Power Plants
Executive Summary America’s improving air quality is an untold success story. Even before Congress passed the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1970, air quality had been improving for decades.
And since 1970, the six so-called criteria pollutants have declined significantly, even though the generation of electricity from coal-fired plants has increased by over 180 percent...
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Scary stories
This past week — as delegates from 182 countries circled and plotted in Bonn about how to avoid the great upcoming Copenhagen Climate Policy Collapse — there appeared the usual bumper crop of stories that either regurgitated climate alarmism, positively promoted it, or otherwise carried the banner for pointless policy upheaval.
Despite Al Gore’s claims of too much denialism in the press, the mainstream media has been almost entirely captured by his alleged “Inconvenient Truth.” The skeptical voices that have always been essential to science — and freedom — have been marginalized and ridiculed, and nonsense walks proudly on stilts.
Typical was widespread and unquestioning coverage of a report this week from the UN claiming that climate change was killing more than 300,000 people a year. The report’s figures were found to have been entirely manufactured, but that revelation received virtually no coverage... [snip]
One event that received virtually zero coverage in the mainstream media this week was the Heartland Institute’s Third Annual International Conference on Climate Change, which took place in Washington.
That was perhaps because the conference presented climate scientists and economists who refuted fashionable alarmism and subjected the Waxman-Markey bill — which seeks to impose a cap-and-trade system for carbon dioxide emissions — to withering analysis, concluding that it would destroy jobs, raise prices and do nothing for the climate.
At the conference, the Cato Institute’s Patrick Michaels suggested that the success of alarmism had a lot to do with the absence of fact-checking in the media. But while that may be true, it seems as much due to the fact that many in the media regard themselves as eco-warriors.
As such, they never let the facts stand in the way of a good, scary environmental story...
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House of Representatives switchboard:
202.225.3121 - 202.224-3121
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ICCC Three Brings Climate Reality To Washington DC
A mere twelve weeks had passed since he gaveled the close of the second International Conference on Climate Change in NYC. Yet last Tuesday found Joseph Bast already delivering the opening speech to its follow-up event, again featuring an elite group of scientists, economists and politicians gathered to discuss climate science and policy. But this time he stood in DC’s Washington Court Hotel, just blocks away from the chamber in which Democrats will soon attempt to pass the very legislation compelling this urgent session – the Waxman-Markey Cap-and-Tax bill.
While both public opinion and the planet’s climate have cooled these past three months, the Left’s green fever has taken a desperate turn in the opposite direction.
In April, EPA chief Lisa Jackson made good on her promise to pursue endangerment status and subsequent pollutant regulation of CO2 and five other greenhouse gases, an act likely crafted to coerce accelerated legislative action. It worked -- just weeks ago, such legislation -- the American Clean Energy Security Act (HR 2454) -- cleared its first hurdle by passing Waxman’s own House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Considering the bill’s meritless substance, potential influence on a future global accord, and outrageous price tag (hundreds of billions of dollars annually) the Heartland Institute recognized the need to once again remind the world of the “widespread dissent to the asserted ‘consensus’ on the causes, consequences, and proper responses to climate change” and that “immediate action to reduce emissions is not necessary.” Hence, an abbreviated (single day) ICCC III: Scientific Debate and Economic Analysis was quickly organized -- and Bast was now addressing over 250 attendees who came to hear and spread the vital message... [snip]"What we see, then, is that the very foundation of the issue of global warming is wrong"
Cap and Trade is Cap and TaxSo then -- We’d borrow $140B a year from the Chinese to give the Chinese $140B a year.
His declaration twelve weeks to the day later that we “must not fail” accurately underscores the urgency of exacting such courage from our policymakers.
“There is no climate crisis. There was no climate crisis. There will be no climate crisis” ... “the correct policy response to the non-problem of climate change is to have the courage to do nothing.”
Reality must prevail. This bill must die...
[Long, but Highly Recommended > ]
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then >
"OPPOSE Waxman-Markey Cap-and-Tax bill."
YOUR Senator: http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm
YOUR Congressman: https://forms.house.gov/wyr/welcome.shtml
or: Speed Message them with your personal distribution list...
and as always, pass it on...
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Georgia lawmaker wants to end ‘birthright citizenship’
U.S. Rep. Nathan Deal, a Republican candidate for governor of Georgia, has proposed changing the long-standing federal policy that automatically grants citizenship to any baby born on U.S. soil, a move opposed by immigrant rights advocates.
Supporters of Deal’s proposal say “birthright citizenship” encourages illegal immigration and makes enforcement of immigration laws more difficult...
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'Power' move by male students ruffles U. of C.
A group of University of Chicago students think it's time the campus focused more on its men.
A third-year student from Lake Bluff has formed Men in Power, a student organization that promises to help men get ahead professionally. They say it's about time men are championed, noting that recent job losses hit men harder and that women earn far more bachelor's and master's degrees than do men.
"It's an enormous disparity now," said Warren Farrell, author of "The Myth of Male Power" and former board member of the New York chapter of the National Organization for Women. He noted, among other things, an imbalance in government and private initiatives that advance the interests of women and girls."But the group's emergence has been 'controversial', with some critics charging that its premise is misogynistic..."
[And they say it with a straight face.]
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FLASHBACK >
The Crisis of the Disappearing Educated Male
Hostility toward men and masculinity begins in daycare and increases each year thereafter. Sexual harassment training and policies have created an uncertain environment, if not a hostile one, where men have to watch their every word and action lest it be misunderstood or misinterpreted.Is it any wonder that men are avoiding today's college campuses?
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White House won't cross picket line for event
Washington - Steering clear of a messy labor dispute, the White House on Friday said Vice President Joe Biden and other members of President Barack Obama's Cabinet have scrapped plans to attend a national mayors' conference in Rhode Island rather than cross a picket line of local firefighters.
[Who are government employees to decide to honor a picket line? So I can tell my employer I won't do aspects of my job if it means crossing a picket line?]
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Betrayal of the Democratic Party
Several weeks ago the Democrats' leading spokesman for the "little guy," Joe Biden, gave the Commencement address at Syracuse University. Biden, who represents the most radical, leftist, big government president in the history of America had this to say about America's plain people:"Ladies and gentlemen, imagine a country that lifts up the windows of opportunities instead of slamming them down that has occurred over the last 15 years. . . . Imagine a country where every single American has a fighting chance, just a fighting chance, and a country that lives up to our promise of our ideals and leads the world with the power of our example, not just the example of our power. This is the story of America"
Sorry Mr. Biden. When the American businessman is vilified, when bureaucrats rule instead of the law, when taxpayers are robbed to pay for useless federal agencies, when government spends more than it takes in, when the middle class is forced to pay for increasing federal debt, when states rights are disrespected, when socialist intellectuals drive national policy, when Congress cowers in the face of the Executive Branch and fails to read its own legislation no one in America will have a "fighting chance" other than the new Robber Barons leading the Democratic Party.
As a great Democrat once put it, it's all right if you want to disguise yourself as Karl Marx or Lenin. But please don't claim to be marching "under the banner of Jefferson, Jackson, or Cleveland." When Democrats rob the little guy of his initiative and supplant it with Big Brother, the party in power is not living up to "the promise of our ideals" Mr. Biden.
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Reagan Recalled at Statue Installation
In speeches at a ceremony to unveil a statue of Ronald Reagan in the United States Capitol, Republican admirers of the 40th president repeatedly invoked Reagan’s insistence that America’s brightest days lay ahead and that the focus should always be on the future not the past.
But for a brief few moments, members of the diminished Republican minorities in Congress seemed to relish an opportunity to relive the glory days of the early 1980’s. And judging from Democrats’ sparse attendance at the ceremony, they had little interest in looking back.
“When America thought our best days lay behind us, Ronald Reagan showed they still lay ahead,” ... “When the world thought freedom was in retreat, Ronald Reagan proved that liberty was still the strongest force in history.”
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“We Were All Appalled By the Bush Years”
Thus a neighbor of retired State Department intelligence analyst Walter Kendall Myers and his wife, Gwendolyn, on the “frustration with U.S. policies” shared by all right-thinking people in the upper-Northwest D.C. bastion of liberalism in which they reside.
Still, a little shiver of shock has run through members of this open-minded community as it turns out that the frustrations of Mr. and Mrs. Myers—accused spies for Cuba—seem to have been deeper, if not of longer standing, than their own...
And by the way, excellent work on clearances, State Department.
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