On Monday all the talk in the news was of an Israeli Rabbi who had called on G-d to strike down Abbas, the head of the terrorist Palestinian Authority, and the rest of his gang. On Tuesday, terrorists murdered a pregnant woman and three other people. The same media that dedicated a great deal of time and energy to condemning Rabbi Yosef for inciting violence, wasted no such time on discussing the constant incitement to violence practiced by the Palestinian Authority media under Abbas’ authority. Earlier this month Abbas had participated in a ceremony honoring the Munich Massacre terrorists. But the media has never been particularly interested in discussing Muslims calls to violence, only in tarring any opponents of Muslim terrorism in the darkest and ugliest shades.
The murder of four Israelis and an unborn child was described not in terms of their human toll, but their political toll. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs condemned the terrorists as “enemies of peace”. The six orphans no doubt thank him for his concern for “peace”. State Department spokesman PJ Crowley dispensed with the human side entirely, warning that, “There may well be actors in the region who are deliberately making these kinds of attacks in order to try to sabotage the process”. A statement that could have been produced by a particularly unfeeling computer.
Gibbs boasted that the Palestinian Authority had condemned the attack. In reality what the Palestinian Authority had said was that the attack went “against Palestinian interests”. As condemnations go, this is right up there with, “Don’t sell drugs while the police are watching my house” and that all time champion, “I am completely against adultery in an election season”. The Palestinian Authority did not condemn terrorism. It condemned the attack because it wasn’t in their interest today to murder the Ames’ and their friends today. Tomorrow it might be again.
Meanwhile the US is funding a Palestinian Authority ad campaign aimed at Israel, which suggests that Abbas and his terrorist gang is interested in peace, and Israel isn’t. So while Obama talks about being evenhanded, he is actually funding a series of domestic attack ads against Netanyahu, and for Abbas.
The media coverage has proven to be every bit as human as Gibbs and Crowley, focusing on the murders only in terms of their potential for disrupting the negotiations. This has been the modus operandi for almost two decades now, as articles have run off the press treating every murder of Israelis not in terms of the dead, but in terms of what it will do to the prospects for a terrorist Palestinian Arab state.
There is of course not a word of regret from any of Hamas’ useful idiots in Code Pink or any of the other leftist supporters of the flotilla. The Huffington Post, which ran a puff piece promoting Khaled Meshaal, has no regrets either. Neither do any of those who called for an end to the blockade of Gaza. The same people who can spend pages moaning about the plight of the people of Gaza showed their true humanitarian colors with their silence. Ordinary Arab Muslims meanwhile filled the comments section of newspapers with cries of “Allahu Akbar”. As they have in response to the murder of Jews for over a thousand years.
There is of course no talk permitted of that. No context given beyond that of the omnipresent “occupation”. No acknowledgment that murdering Jews is part of the Koran, which dehumanizes Jews in particular, and other non-Muslims in general. Meanwhile within Israel itself, the left has conducted a hateful campaign of incitement against those Jews they brand as settlers. While the Ames’ were being murdered, leftist radical writers like Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua were calling for a boycott of settlements. Like the ghetto police and the Kapos who responded to being confined to ghettos and concentration camps by beating the Jews that the Germans had placed under their authority, Israel’s leftists respond to European boycotts by finding Jews within their own country to boycott.
But to the left the Jews are occupiers, much as they were to the Nazis. The murder of Jews is discussed only in terms of whether the latest bodies of men, women and children will dissuade Israeli from making more concessions to terrorists. In their eyes Arab Muslims are human, Israeli Jews are not. Will the murder of a pregnant woman keep Israeli negotiations away from the table for an extra day? An extra hour. An extra minute. That is all that matters.
Rube Goldberg, for those of you who are unaware, was a cartoonist who is probably best known for his satirical sketches depicting overly complex and convoluted machines designed to perform simple and mundane tasks. In one of his cartoons he shows a contraption for a self-operated napkin. The man sitting at the table enjoying his soup lifts his spoon with one hand which pulls on a string which then jerks a ladle that in turn tosses a cracker to a parrot which then jumps to catch the treat upsetting a bowl of seeds on the opposite end of the perch. These seeds then fall into a bucket putting extra weight on a chord that opens a cigar lighter setting off a firework which cuts a string and allows the pendulum of a clock to swing back and forth. At the end of that pendulum is a napkin which passes in front of the mouth of the wearer and wipes his mouth. Of course the fact that such a device was not necessary because the man’s other hand is not doing anything except sitting on the table is not missed by anyone paying attention. All this man had to do was pick up his napkin in his other hand to wipe his mouth rather than wear such a funny device.
Such overly complex contraptions have become known as Rube Goldberg devices and every year there are even contests held in his honor where people construct machines with go through a myriad of often unrelated steps to do simple tasks such as turning on a light switch. The point is to be not only humorous, although that certainly does happen, but to show off engineering skills because these complex contraptions rely on all sorts of natural forces and are not as easy to construct as one might imagine. Often times debugging these contraptions to make them work properly is more of the trick than anything else.
Over the course of the years the American economy has become one huge Rube Goldberg device as well. It should not be one, but it is.
Try to get something that you want or need in life and think about everything that is being done so that you can buy said thing. For the sake of example, let’s look at the often used and universal example of the widget.
A man wants a widget. So how does he get one? Well, to the untrained eye it might appear that he just goes down to the local widget dealership, finds one he likes and then pays for it and drives off the lot. The only part of the Rube Goldberg device he is seeing however is the napkin wiping the mouth of the soup eating man. What is behind the scenes is actually much more complex and overly so.
In order for him to actually get the widget it requires much, much more to happen. Most of this is unnecessary. First the person that wants to build widgets has to apply for things such as business licenses and approvals from possibly several government authorities. If any one of these groups refuse for any reason then no widgets will be had. Then the person looking to make widgets often has to go and get a loan in order to capitalize his or her business. This requires going to the bank and, once again, filling out all sorts of applications; many of which are government required forms which add another layer of bureaucratic mess to the mix. Then once the loan is acquired the businessperson needs to build their facility. Once again this requires filling out forms and permits galore for local, state and federal authorities. The process often includes the government making demands, some reasonable but most wholly unreasonable, of the businessman or woman which affect the overall design and cost of the soon to be built widget plant. There are inspections to make sure everything meets with the government’s approval and so on.
Oh, but that is not then end of the Rube Goldberg device. Nope. There is more!
Racists, Xenophobes and bigots. Those are just a few terms used to describe the opponents of the Islamic center planned near Ground Zero. These characterizations could possibly be avoided, however, by more fact-based protest.
To date, defenders of the center seemed undeterred, despite all that is know about the project front man. Look just a bit deeper.
Among the golden nuggets of evidence produced during the trial of the United States vs. The Holy Land Foundation et al is a document that should end any ambiguity concerning the true intent of Feisal ABDUL-RAUF in his quest to construct an Islamic center at Park Place. In fact, it should be cause to reexamine all Islamic centers and mosques that fall within a certain criteria. Cataloged as “Exhibit 003-0085” by the U.S. federal government, a document translated from Arabic to English titled An Explanatory Memorandum, On the General Strategic Goal for the Group In North America details the objectives of the Muslim Brotherhood in America.
Feisal ABDUL RAUF is indeed an adherent and promoter of the Muslim Brotherhood’s goals and objectives. Any doubt to his Muslim Brotherhood connections can be quelled by the excellent and timely report by Alyssa A. Lappen, which is required reading for factual insight into ABDUL RAUF’s link to the Muslim brotherhood.
Clearly, according to this document, the objective of the Muslim Brotherhood is to convert the U.S. into an Islamic nation through sabotage and subterfuge. It is a handbook to achieve that end. The author painstakingly describes the process of “settlement,” among others, and further described its meaning and the methods to be employed:
The process of settlement is a “Civilization-Jihadist Process” with all the word means. The Ikhwan* must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believersso that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victoriousover all other religions. [Emphasis added].
The succinct analysis by Ms. Lappen of point 17 of the document clearly illustrates that “[b]uilding Islamic centers equals building military “battalions,” points from which to later stage the planned destruction of the West.”
And what better place inside our front lines is there but within the perimeter of destruction at Ground Zero?
* Ikhwan (Arabic for brothers) was the Islamic religious militia which formed the main military force of the Arabian ruler Ibn Saud.
Democratic governments derive their legitimacy from popular support in direct elections. Non-Democratic governments derive their legitimacy from a “special duty” to protect the country as embodied by a particular racial or economic group, in accordance with a set of overriding values. Such governments will typically explain that they cannot have democracy, because open democracy would endanger the groups and values that they are trying to protect. Democracy becomes the enemy, a threat would unleash the very evils they are trying to prevent. They will claim that at some future time, when all the threats have been purged, democracy will become possible. But not now.
The paradox at the heart of this is obvious. If the non-democratic regime really represents the people, then why not allow the people to have the final say? The regime will have two answers. 1, The people are not mature enough to be able to make an informed decision. 2, There are destructive elements in the country that would corrupt the elections.
The first answer is the more honest one, because it admits that the regime believes that the people are too stupid to govern themselves. That its leadership is wiser and better than the people they rule over. Only at some future time when the people have been sufficiently reeducated, they might be ready for some power. The second answer moves into the realm of conspiracy theories, as the regime has to find internal enemies to suppress, in order to justify their tyranny. These internal enemies had to be an “elite”, powerful enough to run everything in secret. Powerful enough to justify tyranny and massacres in order to combat them.
The French Revolution’s Committee of Public Safety, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union all demonstrated the successive rounds of bloodshed needed to maintain their hold on power. Tyranny was justified by resorting to the powerful enemies they had to fight, which in turn justified the atrocities they committed. The freemasons, the Jews, the capitalists– all examples of covert forces that had to be fought through repression and tyranny.
Let’s begin by looking at how Lenin justified Soviet tyranny
“Infatuated with the “purity” of democracy, Kautsky inadvertently commits the same little error that all bourgeois democrats always commit, namely, he takes formal equality (which is nothing but a fraud and hypocrisy under capitalism) for actual equality! Quite a trifle!
The exploiter and the exploited cannot be equal. This truth, however unpleasant it may be to Kautsky, nevertheless forms the essence of socialism. Another truth: there can be no real, actual equality until all possibility of the exploitation of one class by another has been totally destroyed.”
American liberals today routinely make Lenin’s distinction between “formal equality” and “actual equality”. Their mission is not that of formal or legal equality, in which people have the same rights under the law– but “actual equality”, which they like Lenin define, as the destruction of all people and institutions they consider to be an obstruction to equality.
Where formal equality is democratic. Actual equality is undemocratic, and of course unequal. It’s a license to tyranny by a small unelected group that has unlimited powers to make war on everyone and everything that they label reactionary or repressive.
Today Obama and the Democrats justify their undemocratic actions in the same way. Wealth redistribution, union control of corporations, affirmative action, nationalization of industries are all tools of “actual equality”. They justify their resistance to popular protest, by first resorting to the “actual equality” argument and claiming that their opponents are tools of the capitalist political elite.
GOP Rep. Rob Bishop of Utah has released the complete Bureau of Lands Management memo outlining a stealth federal land lock-up plan covering an area the size of Colorado and Wyoming combined. Via the Colorado Farm Bureau:
Bishop’s office has release the entire BLM document titled “Treasured Landscapes” of which only pages were released a few months ago. It lays out what some consider a sweeping and detailed plan for changing the way the federal government manages land over the next 25 years.
The document lays out a sea change in the way the federal government manages land. It proposed that rather than manage individual plots of land, regardless of size, the government should consider managing entire “landscapes, ecosystems, airsheds and watersheds.”
The document also gives a not-so-subtle clue as to the size of the land area it seeks to “protect”.
“Of the 264 million acres under BLM management, some 130-140 million acres are worthy of consideration as treasured lands. These areas, roughly equivalent in size to Colorado and Wyoming combined, are valuable for their unspoiled beauty…”
“The hope that fired up the election of Barack Obama has flickered out, leaving a national mood of despair and disappointment. Americans are dispirited over how wrong things are and uncertain they can be made right again. Hope may have been a quick breakfast, but it has proved a poor supper.” — Mortimer Zuckerman, Editor-in-Chief, US News & World Report, July 2, 2010
This from a man who on Fox News recently said he voted for Obama, his newspaper, the New York Daily News, endorsed Obama, and that he even helped one of his speeches!
The problem is an ancient one. How to remove from office a king or, in a republic, an elected leader who has broken the law and/or is perceived to be a threat to both the present and future of the nation? In earlier eras, the solution was usually bloody.
“Who will rid me of this meddling priest?” England’s King Henry II was reputed to have said of Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury. In 1170, his complaint was obliged when Becket was murdered on a cold December evening.
I cite this famous quote only because the tide is rising among Americans who would be rid of Barack Obama. I would never suggest or condone the sword, but surely one would think we the People might have recourse to the courts or Congress.
The fear in both the courts and Congress is the torturous process involved and, of course, the outcome.
Twice in our history, impeachment has been tried and failed, first with Andrew Johnson whose Reconstruction policies following the Civil War were in much disfavor and, in more recent times, with Bill Clinton whose perjuries and other problems were not deemed to rise to a level worthy of removing him from office. Richard Nixon resigned before he could be impeached.
This Fourth of July marks the 234th anniversary of one the most dangerous ideas ever unleashed on the world. That people do not belong to governments, but governments belong to people. This was not an altogether new idea. History was filled with all sorts of theorizing and debating over the grounds on which a king might be overthrown. But the process that began with the Declaration of Independence did not merely set out to replace one set of chains, with a nicer set, but to overturn the top down rule of government, and replace it with a system in which people choose and replace their governments at will.
That sort of liberty is of course a dangerous idea. In most places revolutions mean that one gang is thrown out, and another gang marches in, and the mobs in the street are given a choice between going along or being on the wrong side of the guns. If the current Iranian revolution ever happens, that is exactly what it will end up looking like. It is what revolutions across the world and across time have looked like. The phenomenon best described by George Orwell in the conclusion to Animal Farm, as the pigs who led the revolution become indistinguishable from their former human masters.
America being the work of human beings, rather than angels, it is impossible to say that this sort of thing did not occur at all. The treatment of many veterans of the Continental Army was a particularly shameful chapter in American history. But in the bigger picture, the Constitution did what no form of government had ever done, shift the balance of power toward the people. The Constitution equipped with the Bill of Rights was not just another chain for the people, instead it was meant to be a leash on government.
Today we do not need to refer to other countries and other eras to understand how important that was, because we ourselves are living in a time in which government has begun to pile on the chains, and the leash doesn’t work too well anymore. The late 19th and 20th centuries embraced progressive government and rejected popular rule. Both Republicans and Democrats reintroduced the iron law of elitism, that stands behind all tyranny, the idea that the welfare of the people is best served by the unquestioning rule of a small better qualified class, and that the people can serve their own interests by cooperating in the reforms being implemented for their benefit.
We still pay lip service to the Constitution. Just as every Supreme Court Justice who steps all over the Constitution, makes sure to reference some random line to pin their judicial activism on, and every Congressman and President wraps himself in the Preamble of the Declaration in order to propose laws that utterly pervert its intent. The Constitution and the Declaration have become symbols, rather than realities. They have ceased to be walls, and become bridges that can lead a politician absolutely anywhere.
Do you want to force every American to buy health insurance or pay a fine? Just mention that famous preamble, “All men are created equal”, in order to argue that the government should be able to compel all men to buy a service of its choosing, in order to make them properly equal in their inability to obtain decent medical services. That is what happens when laws become ideas of laws, and ideas become trimmed into aborted phrases that are nothing more than words of poetry.
With time any principle can be turned into poetry, and then into a metaphor that turns out to mean the exact opposite of the original principle. That is all the more true of the dangerous principle of liberty, which is dangerous because it inhibits the rulers, while liberating the ruled. Governments wield the tools of power. Democracy turns access to those tools into a competition, but devalues the tools themselves. Which means that the political elites who compete for those tools will inevitably find a way to rewrite laws in a way that empowers the tools of government. That is what happened to us.
The great fundamental issue now before the Republican party and before our people can be stated briefly. It is: Are the American people fit to govern themselves, to rule themselves, to control themselves? I believe they are. My opponents do not. I believe in the right of the people to rule. I believe the majority of the plain people of the United States will, day in and day out, make fewer mistakes in governing themselves than any smaller class or body of men, no matter what their training, will make in trying to govern them. I believe, again, that the American people are, as a whole, capable of self control and of learning by their mistakes. Our opponents pay lip loyalty to this doctrine; but they show their real beliefs by the way in which they champion every device to make the nominal rule of the people a sham.
So spoke the man who had been the 26th President of the United States, 98 years ago as he was trying to recapture an office against Taft, the candidate of his own party. Roosevelt would not succeed. What he proposed in his speech at Carnegie Hall was to reclaim popular rule through direct primaries, referendums, recalls and using popular will to outweigh the judiciary.
But anyone tempted to cheer old TR might also want to think twice, because the debate was no longer over individual freedom, but over whether the government should protect the people against business interests, or protect business interests against the people. That ugly split in which government excels at playing different elements of the country against each other, for its own benefit was already here. The current ObamaCare framing that supposedly pitted the “people” against the “corporations” was the product of that same political perversity which promises protection to different sides, while feeding off all of them at once.
The long history of the nation is filled with examples of stupid and greedy politicians. The very profession seems to be a magnet for those who are, too often, ill equipped to function well in any other capacity. There are, of course, exceptions.
The death of Robert C. Byrd will be concluded with the ceremonies attendant to someone who should have left the Senate decades ago due to extreme age. Would any State trust its care to a man who, by the time he died, was so impaired that watching him in his final days in the Senate was an embarrassment of befuddlement. The answer is yes.
Byrd will be hailed a great statesmen, the embodiment of the Senate, and other encomiums, but the fact is that he mastered the rules of the Senate and achieved his stature by being reelected enough to have seniority over everyone and everything there including the chamber’s furniture.
Over the years Byrd managed to transfer an estimated $3 billion to the State of West Virginia. It is filled with some fifty highways, bridges, and every other manner of public structure, all named for Robert C. Byrd and even a few for his wife, Emma. For keeping him in office, West Virginia got back $1.75 for every $1 it sent to the U.S. treasury.
There will be brief references to his former membership in the KKK, but little mention of a voting record that resisted equal rights and justice for black Americans. For as long as he could, Byrd held out until the tide turned. To the end, he was a racist, the only senator to vote against the confirmations of both Justice Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas.
Byrd, however, was not intellectually deficient, a common factor among too many elected to high office. It is one thing to be able to raise campaign funds and make promises and quite another to have actually read a book since having left high school or college. He could quote the ancient Romans and classic literature. His greatest redeeming factor was, we’re told, his devotion to the U.S. Constitution.
In Chicago, a trial is unfolding in which the former Governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, is alleged to have improperly used his office to benefit himself from the appointment of a replacement for Barack Obama, formerly a Senator and, at the time, President-elect of the United States.
Does anyone recall the first weeks of Barack Obama’s presidency? He was everywhere on the media all the time.
His constant use of TelePrompters became an instant joke, suggesting he could not say anything unless it was scripted. Indeed, listening to him try to speak without them is a painful process of a very slow selection of words and very long pauses in between.
After his first press conference he stopped holding them until 309 days later when he addressed the oil spill in the Gulf. It was such a lame performance that his advisors apparently thought a speech from the Oval Office, his first, would make up for that. It didn’t.
In this age of 24/7 news coverage, Barack Obama has managed to make himself ubiquitous to the point of complete inanity.
So, I have a bit of advice for him: Shut up, Barack.
The seas have not ceased to rise because you were elected (as promised) and the Earth has not “healed itself.” Indeed, it is bleeding oil at a prodigious rate, confounding BP’s engineers, all graduates no doubt of the Acme School of Oil Drilling.
What have we learned about Barack Hussein Obama? If George W. Bush was considered an amiable dunce, Obama has demonstrated to everyone he is the worst kind of ideologue, totally tone deaf to the Voice of the People.
Fusion politics is the integration of a third party into a two party system. In 1996 Joel Rogers, founder of Apollo Alliance, the people that brought you the stimulus, was getting fed up with the “abusive relationship” the progressives had with the Democrat party and was ready to dump the Democrats. 14 years later the Progressives have eaten the democrat party instead of dumping it. It has not been enough to work with the democrats and have a mutual give and take. They want it all and have gone for it.
If the elected officials do not do 100% of what the Progressive asked for when offering their vote then the elected official has abused the relationship. That does not sound anything like a bipartisan relationship being allowed. It is an all or nothing mandate for the Progressives vote. Because of this perceived abuse the progressives have achieved a sudo form of Fusion Politics becoming a parasite on the Democrat party. Only after so many years of feeding nothing remains of it’s puppet-ed host. They have actually eaten the Democrat party. A similar parasite has been eating the Republicans in recent years and can be found in an almost malignant nature in South Carolina and Arkansas. Lindsey and McPain are the most disguised and yet most volatile variants of this cancer.
How it works in theory. Fusion is simple. It refers to the electoral tactic of two parties “fusing” on one candidate, meaning the candidate appears twice on the ballot under two separate party labels.
But what the Progressives have achieved is a hollow shell party it controls in totality. Reconcile this & slaughter that, you get the picture.
I have written on the issue of Fusion Politics before but after watching this video clip of Joel Rogers discussing how the Progressives have essentially been used by the Democrat party and now it is time to divest themselves of it I had to revive the message.
When I wrote about this before I cited an interview done of Rogers in 1995. That interview touched on Fusion Politics. Then a year after that interview Rogers restates his message about Fusion Politics but he added something. He talked about dumping the democrat party. He claims it has become an “abusive relationship”.
Currently Fusion style politics has been reborn in a New Party. Strangely enough it was actually at one time called “The New Party“. Now it is known as the “Working Families Party”, WFP. This is an active political party in New York.
The WFP chapter meetings around New York are very different than Democratic Party meetings. They are not full of people who are angling for jobs. They are not full of political staffers. They are full of union members, ACORN members, schoolteachers, retirees, tenants, students, immigrants, and anyone else who shares our values. SOURCE : bostonreview.net
What a minute! Acorn and Labor Unions in the electoral process. I wonder how that has turned out for the Working Families Party so far?
Judge Michael Lynch, a New York State Supreme Court judge threw out 33 absentee ballots in the September 15, 2009 Working Families Party primary and found that “testimony and affidavits reveal significant election law violations that have compromised the rights of numerous voters and the integrity of the election process. SOURCE : troyrecord.com
But to the left the Jews are occupiers, much as they were to the Nazis. The murder of Jews is discussed only in terms of whether the latest bodies of men, women and children will dissuade Israeli from making more concessions to terrorists. In their eyes Arab Muslims are human, Israeli Jews are not. Will the murder of a pregnant woman keep Israeli negotiations away from the table for an extra day? An extra hour. An extra minute. That is all that matters.
“The hope that fired up the election of Barack Obama has flickered out, leaving a national mood of despair and disappointment. Americans are dispirited over how wrong things are and uncertain they can be made right again. Hope may have been a quick breakfast, but it has proved a poor supper.” — Mortimer Zuckerman, Editor-in-Chief, US News & World Report, July 2, 2010
The long history of the nation is filled with examples of stupid and greedy politicians. The very profession seems to be a magnet for those who are, too often, ill equipped to function well in any other capacity. There are, of course, exceptions.
Does anyone recall the first weeks of Barack Obama’s presidency? He was everywhere on the media all the time.
