Islam's war against the West

DUBAI, Oct 27 (Reuters) - Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden said the kidnapping of five French nationals in Niger last month had been prompted by France's unjust treatment of Muslims, in an audio message aired on Al Jazeera television on Wednesday.


Looks like the new front on Islam's war aginst the West is France. Will they recend their ban on veils? Will they get out of Bush's war in Afghanistan (that's bin Laben's appellation)? I guess we're about see what kind of stuff the French are made of. There are presently 5 million Muslims in France. That's enough to create a lot of havoc.

WH bristles over top Republican's remarks

CNN White House Correspondent Dan Lothian

The White House is firing back at Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell after he told the National Journal that "the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president." With his usual sarcastic tone, spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters "maybe Senator McConnell is interested in running for President."

Gibbs said there will be time in two years for a presidential campaign, but that "members of the Senate are elected and hired by the people of the United States to get stuff done for the people of the United States, not posture and play political games, gum up the system."


What hypocrisy! The Senate isn’t even in session. There isn’t any business McConnell is supposed to be doing right now. We’re in the midst of a hot political campaign. And on top of all that, isn’t the President of the United States "elected and hired by the people of the United States to get stuff done for the people of the United States, not posture and play political games"? And isn’t his office in session every day of the year? Yet he gets to run around all over the country politicking as usual, lying about the opposition, and generally doing his best to gum up the system. Gibb's hypocrisy is stunning!

Let the money in...

I'm coming to the conclusion that, with perhaps a few exceptions, as a general principle you really can't buy an election. I say that because Meg Whitman has spent $120 million of her own money yet it looks like she isn't gonna win. Could she win if she spent $200 million or $300 million? I doubt it. People are gonna vote for who they decide to vote for. At some point you have put out as much advertising as you can. Putting out any more just isn't going to change the outcome.

This also leads me to think that the money flows toward whoever is perceived as the likely winner. In other words, the reason so many conservative candidates are likely to win is not because so much money is flowing toward them; the money is flowing in their direction because people think they're going to win. If it's true that as a general rule, the money is the result of success and not the cause, then I say repeal McCain-Feingold (looks like Feingold will be repealed). Why not take all the limits off political contributions? All you really need is exposure of the donor list. My concern all along has been that my rights are being trambled on when the government tells me that I can't give a candidate more than $1000.00. And all it does is impower PACs and big labor. Let's put the money back into politics. With good sunshine laws, the risk of money corruption politicians is greatly limited. And we have done rather well in recent years at discovering the corrupt ones and throwing them out on their ear...sometimes into prison.

This is an embarassment

Ascension of the moderates?

I heard Rush saying the other day that in the next Senate, it will be the so-called moderates who have the power, being neatly situated between the left-wing flaming liberals on the one side and the right-wing Tea Party extremists on the other. Does this mean that John McCain will morph back into a "moderate"? I'm sure we can count on that. Too bad the good people of Arizona didn't dump him when they had the chance. Does this also mean that the real power brokers in the next Senate will be the cooperators and compromisers like Lindsey Graham, Joe Lieberman, and the Maine girls? Probably. It may be better than having socialists like Reid and Shumer calling the shots, but it certainly isn't much better.

Also, I predict again that by the end of January Hillary will have resigned so she can run for president. The next two years could be very unpleasant for the current occupant of the White House as Bill and Hillary roam the countryside criticizing his every move. I suspect they will make the criticisms from the right look like pablum.

Liberalism at odds with democratic government

Modern liberalism is fundamentally at odds with democratic government because it demands results that ordinary people would not freely choose. Liberals must govern, therefore, through institutions that are largely insulated from the popular will. The most important institutions for liberals’ purposes are the judiciary and the bureaucracies.

In his First Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln asserted: "The candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court...the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal." Lincoln was thinking of Dred Scott. Today, however, his observation is even more pertinent, as we have resigned into the hands of the federal judiciary ever more vital questions affecting the whole people. We have in very significant measure ceased to be our own rulers.

The Supreme Court, without authorization from any law, has changed our policies and our culture. That process continues as the lower federal courts are following the Supreme Court’s example. The courts, without the authorization from law, are taking out of the hands of the American people the most basic moral and cultural decisions. [Robert Bork, 1995]

The most recent example of what Judge Bork describes is a federal judge ordering the military to accept out-of-the-closet homosexuals.

Sick and Perverse

Writing in an Opinion piece on Foxsnews.com, Annemarie McAvoy says (concerning the Petit killers): "If these men did do the crimes that they have been accused of doing, then our anger, outrage and disgust are certainly warranted. However, if we execute them then we are applying the same 'method' that they did, we are killing them. We are stooping to their level by acting as they did."

Suggesting that there is parity between vicious cold-blooded murder and painless execution by the state following due process is sick. It is beyond sick. It is perverse. It is evil. If there were ever been two human beings (and I use the term loosely) who deserve death, it is these two. In fact, they deserve a slow agonizing death such as they inflicted on their poor victims. Annemarie needs to wake up; she needs to get a life. I'll bet she has no problem at all with the viscious cold-blooded murder of a baby that hasn't even been born yet. Most of the people who thinking like her don't. How perverse her thinking! How utterly sick!

The Trojan Horse

Writing in Der Spiegel Online, Erich Follith excoriates in the serverest terms the anti-Muslim rhetoric taking place in Germany. He then admits: "Of course, these fears are not completely unfounded. Conditions in areas like Berlin's Kreuzberg neighborhood give rise to very real, justified concerns. There are schoolrooms where three-quarters of the students are from immigrant families, students whose German is barely good enough to get by. There are Arab and Albanian family clans that control crime syndicates and receive welfare benefits. There are phenomena like forced marriages and honor killings. In some mosques, imams are encouraging the faithful to engage in Islamist terror. All of this exists, and yet it has nothing to do with ordinary Islam and the day-to-day lives of well over 90 percent of Germany's Muslims. And yet these are precisely the kinds of things that fuel cheap attempts to create stereotypes of Muslims as the enemy." (8/31/10)

The dangerous flaw in Herr Follith's analysis in revealed in his statement, "All of this exists, and yet it has nothing to do with ordinary Islam and the day-to-day lives of well over 90 percent of Germany's Muslims." To insist on making a distinction between "radical Islam" and "ordinary Islam" is the fatal error that will, if not forsaken, inevitably bring the world to it's knees. The truth is, the 90% of "ordinary Islam" is the Trojan Horse for the 10% of "radical Islam," which is more accurately described as "true Islam." And 10% of one billion is a lot of dangerous soldiers of Allah.

People such as Herr Follith better wake up before it's too late. Europe is already well on its way to becoming fully Islamicized.

Danke and Merci!

Aug 12, 6:20 AM (ET) By MARCY GORDON
WASHINGTON (AP) - The $700 billion U.S. bailout program launched in response to the global economic meltdown had a far greater impact overseas than other countries' financial rescue plans did on the U.S., according to a new report from a congressional watchdog.
Billions of dollars in U.S. rescue funds wound up in big banks in France, Germany and other nations. That was probably inevitable because of the structure of the Treasury Department's program, the Congressional Oversight Panel says in a new report issued Thursday.
The U.S. program aimed to stabilize the financial system by injecting money into as many banks as possible, including those with substantial operations overseas. Most other countries, by contrast, focused their efforts more narrowly on banks in their nations that usually lacked major U.S. operations.
But the report says that if the U.S. had gotten more data on which foreign banks would benefit the most, the government might have been able to ask those countries to share some of the cost.
"There were no data about where this money was going," panel chair Elizabeth Warren said in a conference call with reporters on Wednesday. "The American people have a right to know where the money went."
An example: Major French and German banks were among the biggest beneficiaries of the U.S. rescue of American International Group Inc., yet the American government shouldered the entire $70 billion risk of pumping capital into the crippled insurance titan. The report compares that with the $35 billion that France spent on its overall financial rescue program and the $133 billion that Germany spent.
Much of the $182 billion in federal aid to AIG - the biggest of the government rescues - went to meet the company's obligations to its Wall Street trading partners on credit default swaps, a form of insurance against default of securities. The partners included French banks Societe Generale, which received $11.9 billion in AIG money, and BNP Paribas, which got $4.9 billion, and Germany's Deutsche Bank, $11.8 billion.
Of the 87 banks and financial entities that indirectly benefited from the U.S. aid to AIG, 43 are foreign, according to the report. In addition to France and Germany, they include banks based in Canada, Britain and Switzerland.
In addition to AIG, many of the U.S. banks and automakers that received billions in bailout aid derive a large proportion of their revenue from operations outside the U.S., the report noted.
The watchdog panel was created by Congress to oversee the Treasury Department rescue program that came in at the peak of the financial crisis in the fall of 2008. It has said it's unclear whether U.S. taxpayers will ever fully recoup the cost of the AIG bailout. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that taxpayers will lose $36 billion.

Now we know where the real money is.