Political Digest March 31, 2010

I post articles because I think they are of interest. Doing so doesn’t mean that I necessarily agree with every—or any—opinion in the posted article.

Man charged with threatening to kill Cantor and his family
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/virginiapolitics/2010/03/post_662.html?wpisrc=nl_pmpolitics
A threat against a Republican, from, I read, an Obama contributor and self-professed Muslim. Doubtless Janet N is on the case. Excerpt: A Philadelphia man has been charged with threatening to kill Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and his family. A two-count complaint and warrant was filed today accusing Norman Leboon, 33, of threatening to kill Cantor and his family in a YouTube video posted online this month, according to U.S. Attorney Michael L. Levy and FBI Special Agent in Charge Jan Fedarcyk. "The Department of Justice takes threats against government officials seriously, especially threats to kill or injure others," Levy said in statement. "Whether the reason for the threat is personal or political, threats are not protected by the First Amendment and are crimes." Cantor spokesman Brad Dayspring said the congressman was notified over the weekend by authorities that a credible threat was made against his life, and that an arrest had been made.

Muslim charged with threatening to kill Rep. Eric Cantor: "Remember Eric . . . our judgment time, the final Yom Kippur has been given. You are a liar, you're a Lucifer, you're a pig"
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2010/03/muslim-charged-with-threatening-to-kill-rep-eric-cantor-remember-eric-our-judgment-time-the-final-yo.html
Excerpt: Leboon identifies himself as a Shi'ite Muslim -- and certainly his vicious antisemitism is in keeping with Islamic attitudes toward Jews (cf. Qur'an 5:82, 5:59-60, etc.).

RNC expense report renews criticism about Steele's spending
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/29/AR2010032903822.html?wpisrc=nl_headline
Beyond dumb. Politics is a PR business. Hall’s updating of an old saying, “Whom the gods would destroy, they first give a sense of entitlement.” Excerpt: The Republican National Committee and its chairman, Michael S. Steele, were engulfed in controversy again Monday after new financial reports showed that the party used tens of thousands of donor dollars for luxe hotels, private jets and other questionable expenditures.

STEYN: A healthy dose of catastrophe
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/mar/27/a-healthy-dose-of-catastrophe/
Excerpt: In 2003, Washington blessed a grateful citizenry with the Medicare prescription drug benefit, it being generally agreed by all the experts that it was unfair to force seniors to choose between their monthly trip to Rite-Aid and Tony Danza in dinner theater. However, in order to discourage American businesses from immediately dumping all their drug plans for retirees, Congress gave them a modest tax break equivalent to 28 percent of the cost of the plan. Fast-forward to the dawn of the Obamacare utopia. In one of a bazillion little clauses in a 2,000-page bill your legislators didn't bother reading (because, as Rep. John Conyers explained, he wouldn't understand it even if he did), Congress voted to subject the 28 percent tax benefit to the regular good ol' American-as-apple-pie corporate tax rate of 35 percent. For the purposes of comparison, Sweden's corporate tax rate is 26.3 percent, and Ireland's is 12.5 percent. But just because America already has the highest corporate tax in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development is no reason why we can't keep going until it's double Sweden's and quadruple Ireland's. I refer you to the decision last year by the donut chain Tim Hortons, a Delaware corporation, to reorganize itself as a Canadian corporation "in order to take advantage of Canadian tax rates." Hold that thought: "in order to take advantage of Canadian tax rates" - a phrase hitherto unknown to American English outside the most fantastical futuristic science fiction. Ask yourself this: If you impose a sudden 35 percent tax on something, are you likely to get as much of it? Go on, take a wild guess. On the day President Obama signed Obamacare into law, Verizon sent an e-mail to all its employees warning that the company's costs "will increase in the short term." And in the medium term? Well, U.S. corporations that are able to do so will get out of their prescription drug plans and toss their retirees onto the Medicare pile. So far, just three companies - John Deere & Co., Caterpillar and Valero Energy Corp. - have calculated that the loss of the deduction will add a combined $265 million to their costs. An additional 3,500 businesses presently claim the break. The cost to taxpayers of that 28 percent benefit is about $665 per person. The cost to taxpayers of equivalent Medicare coverage is about $1,200 per person. So we're roughly doubling the cost of covering an estimated 5 million retirees. This single component of "health" "care" "reform" neatly encompasses all the broader trends about where we're headed - not just in terms of increased costs and worse care, but also in the remorseless governmentalization of American life and the disincentivization of the private sector. As we see, even the very modest attempts made by Congress to constrain the 2003 prescription drug plan prove unable to prevent its expansion and metastasization. The one thing that can be said for certain is that, whatever claims are made for Obamacare, it will lead to more people depending on government for their health arrangements. Those 5 million retirees are only the advance guard. And, if you're one of those optimistic souls whose confidence in the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is unbounded, let's meet up in three years' time and see who was correct - the bureaucrats passing out the federal happy juice or the real businesses already making real business decisions about Obamacare. Can we afford this? No. Even on the official numbers, we're projected to add to the existing $8 trillion in debt another $12 trillion over the next decade. What could we do? Tax those big, bad corporations a bit more? Medtronic has just announced that the new Obamacare taxes on its products could force it to lay off 1,000 workers. What do those guys do? Well, they develop products such as the recently approved pacemaker that's safe for MRI scans and the InterStim bladder-control device. So that's 1,000 fewer people who'll be working on new stuff. Well, so what? The public won't miss what it never knew it had. So again, the effect is one of disincentivization - in this case, of innovation.

New boards and commissions created in the healthcare bill
http://tickerforum.org/cgi-ticker/akcs-www?post=132642
Need a job? Want to be a government worker? Can you support the union and vote for the statist party? Here’s where to apply.

Healthcare Timeline
http://www.kff.org/healthreform/8060.cfm
Excerpt: With the enactment of comprehensive health reform, the Kaiser Family Foundation has prepared a timeline detailing when specific provisions of the legislation are scheduled to take effect. The implementation timeline reflects the provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which President Obama signed on March 23, 2010, as well as provisions in the Health Care & Education Reconciliation Act passed by the House and Senate. It includes more than a dozen key provisions scheduled to take effect in 2010, including the creation of a national high-risk pool for people with pre-existing conditions that can’t buy insurance on their own, tax credits for small businesses that obtain health coverage for their workers and assistance for Medicare beneficiaries with high drug costs who get hit by the drug benefit’s coverage gap or “doughnut hole,” and continues through 2014, when the major reforms to expand access to health coverage are fully implemented.

The Rich Can't Pay for ObamaCare
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052702304370304575151682845921038.html?mod=djemITP_h
Excerpt: President Barack Obama's new health-care legislation aims to raise $210 billion over 10 years to pay for the extensive new entitlements. How? By slapping a 3.8% "Medicare tax" on interest and rental income, dividends and capital gains of couples earning more than $250,000, or singles with more than $200,000. The president also hopes to raise $364 billion over 10 years from the same taxpayers by raising the top two tax rates to 36%-39.6% from 33%-35%, plus another $105 billion by raising the tax on dividends and capital gains to 20% from 15%, and another $500 billion by capping and phasing out exemptions and deductions. Add it up and the government is counting on squeezing an extra $1.2 trillion over 10 years from a tiny sliver of taxpayers who already pay more than half of all individual taxes. It won't work. It never works. The maximum tax rate fell to 28% in 1988-90 from 50% in 1986, yet individual income tax receipts rose to 8.3% of GDP in 1989 from 7.9% in 1986. The top tax rate rose to 31% in 1991 and revenue fell to 7.6% of GDP in 1992. The top tax rate was increased to 39.6% in 1993, along with numerous major revenue enhancers such as raising the taxable portion of Social Security to 85% of benefits from 50% for seniors who saved or kept working. Yet individual tax revenues were only 7.8% of GDP in 1993, 8.1% in 1994, and did not get back to the 1989 level until 1995. Punitive tax rates on high-income individuals do not increase revenue. Successful people are not docile sheep just waiting to be shorn.

How secure is the border?
http://www.secureborderintel.org/TusconSector-armedescorts.html
Not very.

My Destructive Generation
http://rightbias.com/news/032510gen.aspx
Excerpt: My generation could well be the first generation in American history to leave our country worse off than we found it. I am a member of the baby boomer generation. The generation that came of age in the late sixties during the turbulent times of Woodstock, Watergate and Vietnam. The generation that is now holding the reins of power in most American institutions, from politics to media, to education and culture. The generation that will likely be responsible for squandering America's hard won freedoms and changing America into a third world country, all in the name of 'equality' and 'social justice.' A defining hallmark of baby boomers on the left is hubris and an absolute refusal to learn or acknowledge the lessons of history. They know best. Moral relativism is the cornerstone of most baby boomers. Their theories rest on subjective, personal values instead of concrete scientific definitions. And they acknowledge no other authority or moral code larger than one's choice. They have adopted the Rousseauian strategy of emphasis on passion instead of reason.* And despite the utter failure of the social policies they have instituted, they persist in believing that they can define their own reality. Author Shelby Steele, in his book White Guilt, comes closest to explaining how and why the baby boomer generation believes as it does. Steele makes the excellent point that every generation, when it comes of age, seeks to challenge authority and tradition. Like most adolescent rebels, they are quickly humbled because they overestimate their own truth and underestimate the truth of their elders. They learn a valuable life lesson when they are smacked down by their elders and reality.

The president meets reality
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/feb/02/the-president-meets-reality/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_opinion
Excerpt: Reality bites. President Obama is just discovering this, after campaigning astride a unicorn of hope and change and after a year of trying to govern high atop Fantasyland.
The real world - replete with violence, competing interests and a cast of evil characters - has intruded on Mr. Obama's starry-eyed plan to recast America as a perpetually apologetic, unexceptional nation that will no longer do anything that could be perceived as antagonistic. Mr. Obama did not anticipate, however, that our adversaries would perceive these moves not as olive branches but as opportunities to run circles around the United States. Russia walked all over him by getting him to abandon a long-agreed-to missile-defense plan for Eastern Europe. Iran snickered at his flaccid attempt to halt its nuclear weapons program and his weak "condemnation" of its internal crackdown. China and India laughed him out the door at Copenhagen when they told him he could forget his climate-change regulations. Even the International Olympic Committee told him to take his Chicago bid for a hike. But the "make nice" policies that caused the biggest splash were those directly related to al Qaeda. Through his announced policies to close the terrorist detainee facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to end the use of enhanced interrogation techniques, to investigate and possibly prosecute the CIA interrogators and to announce the civilian trials in New York of Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and three other top al Qaeda terrorists, Mr. Obama set out to show the world that President Bush and his destructive policies finally were gone. (Except, of course, in every speech Mr. Obama gives.) The new president would be the polar opposite of the warmongering old one, and our enemies would respond with a far-less-hostile position toward us.

Video Shows Harry Reid Supporters Attacking Tea Party Bus
http://gatewaypundit.firstthings.com/2010/03/breaking-video-show-harry-reid-supporters-attacking-tea-party-bus/
Ah, the tolerant Left caught in action…

The Law is an Ass
http://www.neptunuslex.com/2010/03/30/the-law-is-an-ass/
Lawyers. In two years, someone will be doing a brisk business in torches and pitchforks. Excerpt: The father of a Marine slain in Iraq has been ordered to pay the court costs of the odious Phelps clan: Lawyers for the father of a Marine who died in Iraq and whose funeral was picketed by anti-gay protesters say a court has ordered him to pay the protesters’ appeal costs. On Friday, the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ordered that Albert Snyder of York, Pa., pay costs associated with Fred Phelps’ appeal. Phelps is the leader of the Westboro Baptist Church, which conducted protests at the funeral of Snyder’s son, Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder, in Westminster in 2006. Lawyers for Snyder say the Court of Appeals has ordered him to pay $16,510.80 to Phelps for costs relating to the appeal, despite the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to review the Court of Appeals’ decision. I guess he hadn’t given enough.

Attorney General Eric Holder Rules Out Death Penalty for Illegal Aliens Charged With Murder in Washington Suburb
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/63534
Now if the were in the militia….Excerpt: Attorney General Eric Holder has directed prosecutors in a federal conspiracy and murder trial not to seek the death penalty for three El Salvadoran men who are in the United States illegally. The three are accused of robbing and shooting Claros Luna on July 29, 2009 in Alexandria, Va., just a few miles from the Justice Department, as Luna transported a prostitute from Maryland to Virginia. The suspects, Eris Arguera, Alcides Umana and Adolfo Amaya Portillo, admitted to being members of the MS-13 gang, court documents show. They were indicted on Nov. 24 on federal racketeering and murder charges.

Must Read: Violent Liberal Hate Rhetoric: Fifteen Quotes
http://townhall.com/columnists/JohnHawkins/2010/03/30/violent_liberal_hate_rhetoric_fifteen_quotes
Excerpt: In an effort to distract people from the destructive, illegitimate power-grab-of-a-bill masquerading as health care reform that the Democrats just passed over the objections of the American people, liberal members of Congress have spent days over-hyping threats against them. Of course, the sad reality is that EVERYONE who achieves any notoriety at all in this business gets death threats, but it's only treated as noteworthy by the press when it happens to liberals. Had the exact same events that followed the health care debate happened to Republicans instead of Democrats, it wouldn’t have been a page one story in any major paper in the nation. Meanwhile, if conservatives truthfully refer to Barack Obama as a socialist or encourage people to fight back against the takeover of 1/6 of our economy, we're hysterically accused of inciting violence, while liberals who actually call for violence and publicly wish death upon conservatives are given a free pass. Well today, that free pass has run out because people are going to get just a taste of the violent rhetoric that has been coming from the Left for years in this country. Conservatives have long since been willing to stand up and say that they oppose political violence and threats coming from our side – as well we should. So, when will Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Barack Obama finally stand up and condemn the ocean of violence and hatred being spewed by their friends, supporters and ideological allies?

Chavez Arrests Last Opposition TV Station Owner; Latest Example of What FCC Diversity Czar Lloyd Called Taking the Media Seriously?
http://commonamericanjournal.com/?p=12494
Excerpt: Is this what Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chief Diversity Officer Mark Lloyd meant when he said (on camera) Venezuelan thug dictator Hugo Chavez (take that, Sean Penn) had begun “to take very seriously the media in his country”- while praising Chavez’s “incredible…democratic revolution?” The Associated Press (AP) late Friday night reported “Chavez criticizes US as arrests stir concern.” Which plays down the lede in the headline, but gets right into it in the story itself. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Friday defended the arrest of a major TV channel owner, calling him a criminal and denying the government is carrying out an assault on press freedom. The back-to-back arrests this week of two government opponents – including the owner of Venezuela’s only remaining anti-Chavez TV channel – have drawn accusations that Chavez is growing increasingly intolerant and authoritarian as his popular support has slipped.

China: Crunch Time
http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20100329_china_crunch_time?utm_source=GWeekly&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=100330&utm_content=readmore&elq=286f0640d1aa4322a009323dfd783f16
Excerpt: U.S.-Chinese relations have become tenser in recent months, with the United States threatening to impose tariffs unless China agrees to revalue its currency and, ideally, allow it to become convertible like the yen or euro. China now follows Japan and Germany as one of the three major economies after the United States. Unlike the other two, it controls its currency’s value, allowing it to decrease the price of its exports and giving it an advantage not only over other exporters to the United States but also over domestic American manufacturers. The same is true in other regions that receive Chinese exports, such as Europe. What Washington considered tolerable in a small developing economy is intolerable in one of the top five economies. The demand that Beijing raise the value of the yuan, however, poses dramatic challenges for the Chinese, as the ability to control their currency helps drive their exports. The issue is why China insists on controlling its currency, something embedded in the nature of the Chinese economy. A collision with the United States now seems inevitable. It is therefore important to understand the forces driving China, and it is time for STRATFOR to review its analysis of China. China has had an extraordinary run since 1980. But like Japan and Southeast Asia before it, dramatic growth rates cannot maintain themselves in perpetuity. Japan and non-Chinese East Asia didn’t collapse and disappear, but the crises of the 1990s did change the way the region worked. The driving force behind both the 1990 Japanese Crisis and the 1997 East Asian Crisis was that the countries involved did not maintain free capital markets. Those states managed capital to keep costs artificially low, giving them tremendous advantages over countries where capital was rationally priced. Of course, one cannot maintain irrational capital prices in perpetuity (as the United States is learning after its financial crisis); doing so eventually catches up. And this is what is happening in China now. STRATFOR thus sees the Chinese economic system as inherently unstable. The primary reason why China’s growth has been so impressive is that throughout the period of economic liberalization that has led to rising incomes, the Chinese government has maintained near-total savings capture of its households and businesses. It funnels these massive deposits via state-run banks to state-linked firms at below-market rates. It’s amazing the growth rate a country can achieve and the number of citizens it can employ with a vast supply of 0 percent, relatively consequence-free loans provided from the savings of nearly a billion workers. It’s also amazing how unprofitable such a country can be. The Chinese system, like the Japanese system before it, works on bulk, churn, maximum employment and market share. The U.S. system of attempting to maximize return on investment through efficiency and profit stands in contrast. The American result is sufficient economic stability to be able to suffer through recessions and emerge stronger. The Chinese result is social stability that wobbles precipitously when exposed to economic hardship. The Chinese people rebel when work is not available and conditions reach extremes. It must be remembered that of China’s 1.3 billion people, more than 600 million urban citizens live on an average of about $7 a day, while 700 million rural people live on an average of $2 a day, and that is according to Beijing’s own well-scrubbed statistics.

A Word to the Weary
http://hotair.com/archives/2010/03/27/a-word-to-the-weary/
Excerpt: I get a lot of email from people who ask if the final degeneration from capitalism to collectivism is now inevitable. Entitlements are never repealed, after all, and we just got saddled with a back-breaking entitlement, piled atop a national debt that was already crushing us. It seems like it would take a miracle just to undo the damage Barack Obama has done in a single year… and that would just get us back to where George Bush left us. Dependency, unemployment, economic contraction, and socialist politics are a perpetual-motion engine of national decline. I also hear from people who wonder just how bad things really are. If they’re so awful, we should be thinking about unthinkable alternatives. If not, maybe we should follow David Frum’s advice, and work out reasonable terms of surrender with our new socialist overlords. After all, Obama’s not the first guy to wipe his feet with the tattered “Don’t Tread on Me” flag. Perhaps none of the wounds from 2009 and 2010 are all that deep, and we’re just a few elections away from Bush-era prosperity again. Thoughts about the future shape our actions in the present. If you believe the events of the past week have permanently and irrevocably deformed the American economy and culture, your feelings are likely to consist of anger, or despair. I can understand why some are tired of fighting the good fight. Robin Koerner at The Moderate Voice reacts to the Obama Administration’s plan to offer incentives if mortgage holders will forgive part of the principle on overvalued homes:

"Change" Is Not New by Thomas Sowell
http://townhall.com/columnists/ThomasSowell/2010/03/30/change_is_not_new
Excerpt: The recent statement that the earth was warmer in the Middle Ages than it is today, made by the climate scientist who is at the heart of the recent scandal about "global warming" statistics, ought to at least give pause to those who are determined to believe that human beings must be the reason for "climate change." Other climate scientists have pointed out before now that the earth has warmed and cooled many times over the centuries. Contrary to the impression created in much of the media and in politics, no one has denied that temperatures change, sometimes more than they are changing today. …It is those who have been pushing the hysteria who have been playing fast and loose with the facts, wanting to keep crucial data from becoming public, and even "losing" some of that data that supposedly proved the most dire consequences. It has not been facts but computer models at the heart of the "global warming" crusade.

Green think tank tells environmentalists: Leave climate change science behind
http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/677-e2-wire/89617-green-think-tank-to-enviros-leave-climate-science-behind
Excerpt: Leaders of a contrarian environmental think tank, The Breakthrough Institute, have a way to get beyond the climate science wars: Break the link between global warming research and the push for low-carbon energy. Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, in a new essay in Yale Environment 360, argue that environmentalists are too eager to link natural disasters and dangerous weather to man-made climate change. They say this is a losing hand that has been made even weaker by the furor over the now-infamous hacked climate science emails, and controversy surrounding the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Freeing Energy Policy From The Climate Change Debate
http://www.e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2257
Excerpt: The 20-year effort by environmentalists to establish climate science as the primary basis for far-reaching action to decarbonize the global energy economy today lies in ruins. Backlash in reaction to “Climategate” and recent controversies involving the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s 2007 assessment report are but the latest evidence that such efforts have evidently failed. While the urge to blame fossil-fuel-funded skeptics for this recent bad turn of events has proven irresistible for most environmental leaders and pundits, forward-looking greens wishing to ascertain what might be salvaged from the wreckage would be well advised to look closer to home. Climate science, even at its most uncontroversial, could never motivate the remaking of the entire global energy economy. Efforts to use climate science to threaten an apocalyptic future should we fail to embrace green proposals, and to characterize present-day natural disasters as terrifying previews of an impending day of reckoning, have only served to undermine the credibility of both climate science and progressive energy policy.

A National Survey Of Television Meteorologists About Climate Change:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/tv_meteorologists_survey_findings_march_2010.pdf
Excerpt: In January and February 2010, using a web-based method, we surveyed all broadcast TV members of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) and the National Weather Association (NWA) using member email lists provided by the two professional associations. All participants were offered $30 to complete the approximately 20-minute survey. Of the 1,408 names and email addresses provided by AMS and NWA, 35 people were ineligible because we determined that they no longer worked as TV meteorologists, and 44 email addresses proved to be incorrect (and despite an active search, correct email addresses could not be located). Therefore, the valid initial denominator of our sample was 1,373. Fifty-nine of these people refused to participate, 743 did not respond, and 571 completed at least some portion of the survey, yielding a minimum response rate of 41.6% (which assumes that all non-respondents were eligible to participate).

Global Warming Advocates Threaten Blizzard of Lawsuits
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/03/29/global-warming-advocates-threaten-blizzard-lawsuits/?test=latestnews
Let sue ‘em back and crash the courts. Excerpt: Environmentalists, unable to squeeze "cap and trade" rules through the U.S. Senate, have a new strategy for combating what they believe is man-made global warming: They're going to sue. They're revving up their briefs and getting ready to shop for judges who will be sympathetic to their novel claim that the companies they believe contribute to global warming are a "public nuisance."

CIA: Iran capable of producing nukes
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/mar/30/cia-iran-has-capability-to-produce-nuke-weapons/
Excerpt: Iran is poised to begin producing nuclear weapons after its uranium program expansion in 2009, even though it has had problems with thousands of its centrifuges, according to a newly released CIA report. "Iran continues to develop a range of capabilities that could be applied to producing nuclear weapons, if a decision is made to do so," the annual report to Congress states. A U.S. official involved in countering weapons proliferation said the Iranians are "keeping the door open to the possibility of building a nuclear weapon."

Sleeping w/ the Enemy: Obama Hires Muslim Extremist to TSA Senior Policy Advisor
http://www.debbieschlussel.com/19764/sleeping-w-the-enemy-obama-hires-muslim-extremist-to-tsa-senior-policy-advisor/
In my view, it’s not that President Wobbly supports the Muslims. It’s that he has the Chamberlin view that they will behave if we just appease them enough. The fact that this has never worked in history doesn’t deter liberals, because they see policies in relation to their desired outcome and their intent, not what the real results are. Excerpt: Why don’t we just hand over the keys of the Department of Homeland Security to Bin Laden or Nasrallah? That makes sense when you consider that we’re basically doing that anyway.

Hate crimes force Jews out of Malmo: Anti-Semitic threats come from Muslim community
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/mar/29/hate-crimes-force-jews-out-of-malmo/
Yet more Muslims who didn’t get the “Islam is a religion of peace” memo. Excerpt: Marcus Eilenberg is a Swedish Jew whose family roots in Malmo run deep. His paternal grandparents were Holocaust survivors who found shelter in this southern Swedish city in 1945. His wife's parents fled to Sweden from communist Poland in the 1960s. Now the 32-year-old law firm associate feels the welcome for Jews is running out, and he is moving to Israel with his wife and two children in May. He says he knows at least 15 other Jews who are leaving for a similar reason. That reason, he says, is a rise in hate crimes against Jews in Malmo, and a sense that local authorities have little desire to deal with a problem that has exposed a crack in Sweden's image as a bastion of tolerance and a haven for distressed ethnic groups. Anti-Semitic crimes in Europe have usually been associated with the far right, but Shneur Kesselman, an Orthodox rabbi, says the threat now comes from Muslims. "In the past five years I've been here, I think you can count on your hand how many incidents there have been from the extreme right," he said. "In my personal experience, it's 99 percent Muslims." Sweden prides itself on having taken in tens of thousands of the world's war refugees.

Azerbaijan: Jihadist plot against kindergarten, school foiled
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2010/03/29/world/international-uk-azerbaijan-arrests.html?_r=2
Religion of Peace targets Kindergarten. Excerpt: Azerbaijan said on Monday it had detained eight people including a Chechen man on suspicion of planning "terrorist acts" against a school and kindergarten in the capital of the oil-producing Caucasus state. Secular authorities in mainly Muslim Azerbaijan, a tightly controlled former Soviet republic, are concerned over what they say is the rising influence of radical Islam and the threat posed to the country's oil-fuelled economic growth. Some analysts warn of potential spillover from an insurgency in neighbouring Russia's mainly Muslim southern republics, where suspicion fell on Monday after two female suicide bombers blew themselves up on the Moscow metro killing 38 people.

New West Point report details meticulous training Taliban kids go through at Pakistani terror school
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/2010/03/28/2010-03-28_taliban_schools_teach_kids_the_abcs_of_terror.html
Who smears Islam, cartoonists or vile Islamic followers who would so use children? Excerpt: Pakistani terror camps are teaching children the three R's: reading, 'riting and rage. Taliban suicide schools dotting the Af-Pak tribal belt leave no child behind in the deadly lessons. Graduates don't go to college - they blow themselves to bits in Afghanistan to find paradise. Since 2005, when the Haqqani Taliban introduced suicide bombings in the Afghan war, kids have become a messenger of choice. The suicide schools aren't new, but the processes of recruiting, training and operations are detailed in a grim new report by West Point's Combating Terrorism Center.

Students want ‘Our Lord' phrase off diplomas
http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/education/89373257.html
Stealth Jihad takes on private, Presbyterian university. Note to the Muslim students: the name “Trinity” does not refer to Mohammad, a goat and a camel. Excerpt: A group of students at Trinity University is lobbying trustees to drop a reference to “Our Lord” on their diplomas, arguing it does not respect the diversity of religions on campus. “A diploma is a very personal item, and people want to proudly display it in their offices and homes,” said Sidra Qureshi, president of Trinity Diversity Connection. “By having the phrase ‘In the Year of Our Lord,' it is directly referencing Jesus Christ, and not everyone believes in Jesus Christ.” Qureshi, who is Muslim, has led the charge to tweak the wording, winning support from student government and a campus commencement committee. Trustees are expected to consider the students' request at a May board meeting.