Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Political Digest for October 11, 2011

Blog Removed.
If you log on to the Old Jarhead blog and get this notice, please check back. From time to time, Google’s Spam Filter pulls my blog. They restore it when I appeal, but they don’t seem to have the technical ability to fix the problem. I hate to move to another platform with page views running to 10k a week and over 1,150 followers here.

Free PDF Copy of The Coming Collapse of the American Republic.

Count the flags and signs

Deadliest clashes in Egypt since revolution
Apparently al-Washington and al-Franklin and the other Muslim Jeffersonian democrats celebrated by the media as part of the wonderful Arab Spring didn’t get the message that religious tolerance was included in the package. ~Bob. Excerpt: At least 23 people were killed and nearly 200 were wounded in downtown Cairo on Sunday night as a march by Coptic Christians turned into the deadliest outbreak of violence in Egypt since the popular revolt that toppled the country’s autocratic leader in February. The violence began after men in civilian clothes attacked the Christian demonstrators with stones, according to witnesses. Soon, more Christians and Muslims raced downtown, where they clashed with security forces for hours. Protesters torched police personnel carriers along an iconic street that rings the Nile River, and, late in the evening, armored personnel vehicles were dispatched to
Tahrir Square
, where security forces used tear gas to disperse demonstrators.

Americans Sargent, Sims share Nobel economics prize for cause-and-effect theories
Huh. Apparently they were not at the Occupy Wall Street protest when they got the news. Note to Obama—one on the Noble-Winning economists plans to keep his prize in cash for awhile, not invest it! ~Bob. Excerpt: Americans Thomas Sargent and Christopher Sims won the Nobel economics prize on Monday for research that sheds light on the cause-and-effect relationship between the economy and policy instruments such as interest rates and government spending. Sargent and Sims — both 68 — carried out their research independently in the 1970s and ‘80s, but it is highly relevant today as world governments and central banks seek ways to steer their economies away from another recession. … Asked how he would invest his half of the 10 million kronor ($1.5 million) award given the turbulence of today’s financial markets, Sims said: “First thing I’m gonna do is keep it in cash for a while and think.”

‘Increasingly Debauched’: Are Sex, Drugs & Poor Sanitation Eclipsing Occupy Wall Street?
Most of the OWS crowd couldn’t organize a two-car funeral. ~Bob. Excerpt: The situation down at
Occupy Wall Street
continues to deteriorate, as sanitary conditions teamed with the personal actions of the protesters appear to be eclipsing the political gathering’s original push for a more “equitable” society. According to the Daily Mail, the environment down at New York City’s Financial District is “increasingly debauched.” What started out as a gathering of people frustrated over what they see as a lack of opportunity in America (their complaints focused upon corporate greed, the large gap between the poor and rich in America, unemployment, student loans and political corruption), may be developing into something else entirely. Apparently, there are now teenagers and young adults who have descended upon Wall Street in an effort to turn the gathering into a rave. With a “sex, drugs and rock and roll” mentality apparently infiltrating the protests, Mail Online reports:

Proposed millionaires income tax would hit Democratic states hardest
Excerpt: The millionaire tax being pushed by Senate Democrats this week would hit taxpayers in Democrat-dominated states almost twice as hard as those in Republican-dominated states, according to an analysis by The Daily Caller. States that have elected two Republican senators tend to have much lower levels of economic inequality than states which have elected two Democratic senators. Democrat-dominated states tend to have higher percentages of very rich people, higher percentages of very poor people, and a lower percentage of middle-income people. (There’s an old saying that politicians get money from the rich and votes from the poor by promising to protect them from each other. ~Bob.)

Iranian Actress Reportedly Sentenced to One Year in Jail, 90 Lashes
Well, the NYT endorses Shari’a Law, so this can’t be a bad thing, right? ~Bob. Excerpt: Iranian actress Marzieh Vafamehr has been sentenced to a year in jail and 90 lashes for her role in a film about the limits imposed on artists in the Islamic republic, an opposition website reported Sunday. "A verdict has been issued for Marzieh Vafamehr, sentencing her to a year in jail and 90 lashes," Kalameh.com reported.

Turkish Muslim man Beheads Catholic Bishop - Luigi Padovese
Video from the Religion of Peace.

Excerpt: On the very day that Steve Jobs died a new report suggests that the U.S. health care system is spending too much money on people near the end of their lives. The timing of the two events could not have been more ironic. Had Jobs been under the care of the British National Health Service (NHS) or the Canadian Medicare system, he almost certainly would have died two years earlier. That would have been a major loss for the world, by anyone’s reckoning.

Worth reading: The Miracle of iCapitalism
Excerpt: One of my favorite economics essays from which I've drawn bottomless inspiration is Leonard Read's "I, Pencil." He turned a mundane writing instrument into an elementary study of free-market capitalism. What goes for the pencil goes for any of the products Jobs introduced. "I have a profound lesson to teach," Read wrote in the voice of a metaphorical lead pencil. "I can teach this lesson better than can an automobile or an airplane or a mechanical dishwasher because -- well, because I am seemingly so simple. Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me." Read traces the family tree of the pencil from the Oregon loggers who harvest its cedar wood, to the California millworkers who cut the wood into thin slats, to Mississippi refinery workers, to the Dutch East Indies farmers who produce an oil used to make erasers. All of these people, and many more at the periphery of the process, have special knowledge about their life's work in their separate corners of the earth. But none by himself has the singular knowledge or ability to give birth to a pencil. Few will ever come in contact with the others who make the production of that pencil possible.

This Is What a Mob Looks Like
Excerpt: Sally Kohn, a self-identified "community organizer," praised the Wall Street loiterers on CNN's website, comparing the protest to the Boston Tea Party, which she claimed, "helped spark the American Revolution," adding, "and yes, that protest ultimately turned very violent." First of all, the Boston Tea Party was nothing like tattooed, body–pierced, sunken-chested 19-year-olds getting in fights with the police for fun. Paul Revere's nighttime raid was intended exclusively to protest a new British tea tax. (The Wall Street protesters would be more likely to fight for a new tax than against one.) Revere made sure to replace a broken lock on one of the ships and severely punished a participant who stole some of the tea for his private use. Samuel Adams defended the raid by saying that all other methods of recourse -- say, voting -- were unavailable.

Free Trade Agreements Are A Win for Prosperity
Excerpt: Free trade agreements (FTAs) have economically benefited nations the world over since their inception. Poverty rates in countries with low trade barriers are significantly lower, and data in The Heritage Foundation's Index of Economic Freedom demonstrate that free trade also leads to higher incomes, more jobs, and greater equality. That's why it's vitally important to quickly enact the three pending U.S. trade agreements with Colombia, Panama, and South Korea. These FTAs have been sitting on the President's desk since 2007 for no good reason. President Obama has finally made them a priority by sending them to Congress last Monday night.

Russia’s Syria game
Excerpt: A few weeks ago, a senior Russian official assured me that his government wouldn’t block “a strong resolution” in support of the uprising in Syria. Yet Russia this month vetoed a fairly mild UN Security Council resolution. But then Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov invited the Syrian opposition to Moscow, implying that President Bashar al-Assad was no longer an exclusive interlocutor. And just 48 hours after the veto, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev called on Assad to either reform or step aside. Why is Russia behaving like an erratic banana republic rather than a mature power dealing with a threat to regional peace?

Cain’s gift to the GOP Forcing his rivals to get better
Excerpt: Is it time to start taking Herman Cain seriously? Once buried among the fringe candidates for the GOP presidential nomination, the canny Atlanta businessman has taken full advantage of Rick Perry’s collapse, surging past the Texas governor to catch -- and even, in some polls, surpass -- front-runner Mitt Romney. Cain’s strengths? His simple “9-9-9” economic platform (a 9 percent business tax, income tax and national sales tax), an affability that coats an unmistakable inner strength and a sunny disposition that projects self-confidence without arrogance. Plus, in a year when voters are heartily sick of professional politicians, he’s an outsider with both a record of accomplishment in business and a compelling personal story. This includes his upbringing in the segregated South, his service as a Navy systems analyst, a successful term as the head of Godfather’s Pizza and a stint as Federal Reserve Bank chief in Kansas City. He’s even a Baptist preacher. There’s not a whiff of the grievance industry about Cain, a throwback to the up-by-your-bootstraps philosophy of Booker T. Washington. His parents were working class (chauffeur, maid) and he graduated from historically black Morehouse College in Atlanta -- the first member of his family to get a college degree. He’s solidly tied to the African-American experience, yet he’s not running as a “black candidate,” but as an American.

US MUSLIM ‘Leaders’ who fail the Awlaki test
Excerpt: The just assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki was a defining moment for American Muslims. We should have been leading the cheers -- but instead many of our self-appointed “spokesmen” squandered their bandwidth. This one is personal. As one of us, Awlaki’s extreme form of Islamism swayed many Muslims to hate America and the West. Worse -- in flagrant defiance of the central tenets of our Islam -- he taught many Muslims to diminish the value of human life. Yet where most Americans saw a traitor who turned on his nation in order to fight our sons and daughters on the battlefield, too many American Islamic groups were steeped in denial. The Dar al-Hijra mosque in northern Virginia, Awlaki’s last stomping ground before leaving the US, issued statements defending his pre-2002 interfaith work and insinuating that it was torture in Yemeni prisons that radicalized Awlaki. And while the Council on American-Islamic Relations “repudiated Awlaki’s incitement to violence,” it also “urged inquiry into the constitutional issues raised by the assassination.” What does it matter that Awlaki was once a US citizen? Neither by our Constitution nor by Islam am I ashamed to rejoice in his death.

Wall Street’s Disgruntled Utopians
Excerpt: The protesters themselves comprise the usual suspects: badly educated young people (“Students loans=indentured servitude,” read one sign), aging hippies, leftover leftists (“Marx Was Right,” read another), and the purveyors of various wacky conspiracy theories, like the guy whose sign links the Federal Reserve to the pyramid on the dollar bill. This mélange explains the profound ignorance of economic reality that lies behind the protesters’ complaints about the “greed and corruption of the 1%.” In this melodrama, “Wall Street” and “corporations” have rigged the system so that they enrich themselves at the expense of everybody else. “Growing income inequality” is the proof of this nefarious behavior, as the left-wing magazine Mother Jones reports: “A huge share of the nation’s economic growth over the past 30 years has gone to the top one-hundredth of one percent, who now make an average of $27 million per household. The average income for the bottom 90 percent of us? $31,244.” Q.E.D.

Liberals support this because “all cultures are equally valid.” Besides, it’s Shari’a Law and theses guys belong to a religion of peace, so all is well. ~Bob. Excerpt: In a first for the garrison city, sixty masked men carrying iron rods barged into a girls’ school in Rawalpindi and thrashed students and female teachers on Friday. The gang of miscreants also warned the inmates at the MC Model Girls High School in Satellite Town to “dress modestly and wear hijabs” or face the music, eyewitnesses said. Fear gripped the area following the attack and only 25 of the 400 students studying in the college were present on Saturday. The school employs 30 female teachers. Attendance in other educational institutions also remained low. After hearing about the attack, all schools in the city shut down, an official of the Rawalpindi District Administration (RDA) told The Express Tribune.

Tunisia: Muslim mob terrorizes teachers, students and staff at university that refused to admit a girl wearing a niqab
Excerpt: More news of the spread of democracy and pluralism in the glorious Arab Spring Tunisia.

200 suicide bombers 'planning attacks in UK'
Guess they didn’t get the memo. ~Bob. Excerpt: A senior intelligence source has revealed that the figure is a "conservative" estimate of the threat facing the country from UK-based Islamist suicide bombers. The would-be killers are among 2,000 extremists who the security services have said are based in Britain and actively planning terrorist activity of some kind. The figures are contained within a secret government report on the "enduring terrorist threat" facing the UK from al-Qaeda and affiliated organisations, The Sunday Telegraph has been told.

Misplaced Rage of Occupy Wall Street
Excerpt: Bankers have become one of Obama’s favorite whipping boys in public. Behind the scenes he enjoys cashing their checks. Occupy Wall Street is the right outrage, but it’s in the wrong place. It’s not capitalism that is killing us. It’s the people that try to control capitalism for their own means that are killing us.

Aimless Obama walks alone
Excerpt: The reports are not good, disturbing even. I have heard basically the same story four times in the last 10 days, and the people doing the talking are in New York and Washington and are spread across the political spectrum. The gist is this: President Obama has become a lone wolf, a stranger to his own government. He talks mostly, and sometimes only, to friend and adviser Valerie Jarrett and to David Axelrod, his political strategist. Everybody else, including members of his Cabinet, have little face time with him except for brief meetings that serve as photo ops. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner both have complained, according to people who have talked to them, that they are shut out of important decisions.

2012 Presidential Matchups: Election 2012: Obama 42%, Cain 39%
Huh. Racist bastards would vote for the half white guy over the all black guy. ~Bob.
Excerpt: One suspects that the Occupy Raleigh crowd didn’t consider the irony of an attendee at the anti-corporate greed gathering wearing a T-shirt that touts Fidelity Investments. Not only did he attend; he also discussed the group’s goals — or lack thereof — with WTVD.

Occupy Wall Street, Drugs, Working, and Being a 100 Percenter
Excerpt: This scathing and HILARIOUS blog post about the Occupy Wallstreeter’s “We Are the 99 Percent” posts, is not only funny (hysterically so) for those of us on the right, but it really does illustrate the different mind set of each side. Although the authors of the piece, Lori and Jenn, mock the notes written, the bigger point is serious. These kids think they are entitled to things. They think that life is unfair, and the government or somebody should do something to make it fair. They don’t seem to be the least bit familiar with the term “self responsibility.” Many of them have made bad choices in life, and now are experiencing the consequences. They took out more loans than they could pay back. Whose fault is that? They didn’t read the loan papers on the adjustable rate on their home loan. Whose fault is that? They majored in things that were not substantial enough to get a good job. Whose fault is that? The banks don’t force you to take loans. Colleges don’t make you major in Art. What Lori and Jenn are trying to say is that the mindset is wrong. They are trying to say to these young people that they need to take responsibility for their own mistakes. They need to move forward. At least I have some respect for the guy who cleans bathrooms at a Steak house. At least he is willing to take a crappy job to make ends meet. I think all people you talk to that have had some level of success in life, has worked at some crappy job. It’s not fun. It’s not always fair. But it’s better than whining. A lot better. One develops what is called “a work ethic.” Lori and Jenn really do excoriate the girl who has the coke nail. For those who do not know what a coke nail is, it’s when a druggie grows out his or her pinky nail in order to have an easily accessible way of scooping up cocaine power and snorting it in one’s nose. No tools required!

Company that Owns Zuccotti Park Received Green Loan Guarantee from Obama Admin
Excerpt: It’s been a bit of a puzzle as to why the owners of Zuccotti Park that the
Occupy Wall Street
gang has taken over have allowed them to stay. They’re angering residents and pretty much stinking up the place. The owners have mentioned that the park is normally cleaned every night, but they have not been able to clean it in three weeks. Sanitation was “becoming an issue” a few days ago. Lord knows what it’s like now, I hear it’s pretty bad. Could the fact that the parent company of Brookfield Properties received a “green energy” loan guarantee from the Obama administration for a New Hampshire wind farm have anything to do with it?

Sorry OWS, BO beat you there by a mile. ~Bob. Excerpt: Despite his rhetorical attacks on Wall Street, a study by the Sunlight Foundation’s Influence Project shows that President Barack Obama has received more money from Wall Street than any other politician over the past 20 years, including former President George W. Bush. In 2008, Wall Street’s largesse accounted for 20 percent of Obama’s total take, according to Reuters. When asked by The Daily Caller to comment about President Obama’s credibility when it comes to criticizing Wall Street, the White House declined to reply.

Excerpt: “Up until the 1950s, American children yearned for adulthood. When their time came to be adults, they stepped into the role proudly, leaving childhood behind and taking up the mantles of responsibility, honor and dignity. They embraced and championed the ideals of those who came before them while valiantly tackling new ideas and problems that their families, communities and nation faced. Those days were long gone. “Americans now shunned adulthood, preferring to remain in a state of perpetual adolescence. By failing to move forward with grace and dignity, they left a gaping hole in American society. They treated relationships like disposable lighters, tossing marriages away when they ran out of gas. Children were left without families, and even worse, they were left without adults who could be role models of responsible behavior.” I first read that fascinating appraisal of the baby boom generation in 2009, in Brad Thor’s book, “The Last Patriot,” and it was something that has stayed on my mind — at least on the fringes — ever since. There are so many things that are important in my life and the lives of people my age that would come under the heading of recreation or fun that my father or my grandfather would have called silly or childish. The older I get, the more I find myself agreeing with them.

Good News: 'Occupy Boston' Holds Rally for Accused Terrorist
Excerpt: The 'occupy' mob's organizational incoherence and moral bankruptcy continues apace: The downtown protest group Occupy Boston threw its proverbial doors open yesterday, and played host to supporters of accused terrorist Terak Mehanna, who are looking to raise awareness of the Sudbury man’s upcoming trial. The Tarek Mehanna Support Committee came to Occupy Boston’s ever-evolving tent city on the Rose Kennedy Greenway to say Mehanna, a Muslim American pharmacist, is a victim of anti-Muslim sentiment. Occupy Boston hosted the pro-Mehanna rally, but, officially, the leaderless group doesn’t have a position on the case.

Bam’s vanishing green
Excerpt: The shoes just keep dropping in the ever-mushrooming Solyndra scandal -- even as President Obama continues to defend the now-bankrupt solar company and his administration’s decision to grant it $528 million in loan guarantees, courtesy of the taxpayers. Maybe it’s time for the White House to finally admit the folly of its “green jobs” program and attempts by government officials to dictate industrial policy. Not to mention throwing billions in taxpayer money out the window on “green” companies it vowed would jump-start the economy and create 5 million jobs.

Rape victim married off to Muslim rapist
Well, better that 21,000 rape victims die than one liberal be called Islamophobic. ~Bob. Excerpt: The rape victim's family actually forced the rapist to marry the poor girl. If he hadn't, who knows what horrors the victim would have gone through: the Malaysian Islamic reformist group Sisters in Islam has pointed out: In Pakistan, it is reported that three out of four women in prison under its Hudud laws [these are the laws of what it forbidden and permitted by Allah himself], are rape victims. Because rape is equated with zina [unlawful sexual intercourse] under Hudud law, rape victims are required to produce four pious male witnesses. It is of course nearly impossible for the rape victims to produce the four male witnesses required to prove their allegation. Therefore their police report of rape was taken as a confession of illicit sex on their part and they were duly found guilty. This story took place in India, but the laws of Islam are the same there as they are in Pakistan. So if this girl couldn't marry her rapist, she could have ended up being honor killed. But the NY MTA says that it is insulting to call this "savage."

Helmet camera view of dismounted IED strike
Excerpt: First-person helmet camera footage of a Marine being hit with an IED inside a qalat while on a foot patrol in Afghanistan. According to the description of the video on Liveleak, the Marine survived the blast. This video starkly illustrates the difficulty of spotting Remote-Control or Pressure-Plate IEDs, either buried or mounted within qalat walls, for dismounted patrols.

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