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September 2012

ELECTIONS ARE COMING: GOP WAR ON WOMEN? NO!…WOMEN WARRIORS

Heather Ann Wilson is a former Republican member of the United States House of Representatives representing New Mexico’s 1st congressional district from 1998 to 2009. She is the first female military veteran elected to a full term in Congress. She is running for the Senate.

http://heatherwilson.com/
HEALTHCARE

I am running for the Senate because I trust people more than I trust government to make the best decisions for themselves and their families. But that is not what we have today with Obamacare. Obamacare does nothing to control the spiraling cost of care. It raises taxes, cuts Medicare, costs more, and gives people less control over their health care decisions.

For the first time in American history, every citizen will be required to purchase a government approved product. If Washington can mandate how people must spend their money, there is no limit to government power. The law is unconstitutional and if it is not thrown out by the Supreme Court, I will fight to make sure it is repealed and replaced.
DEFENSE

The first and most important responsibility of the federal government is to provide for the common defense. A strong military is the best way to keep the peace. Our young men and women in the military should only be sent into harm’s way to protect America’s vital national interests, with clear missions, and with the force necessary to win and come home again.

Three generations of my family have served in uniform. I have spent my adult life serving to protect our country and I will continue to do so in the Senate.

CLAUDIA ROSETT: SUSAN RICE OBFUSCATING FROM BEHIND

http://pjmedia.com/claudiarosett/rice-on-libya-obfuscating-from-behind/?print=1 With an American ambassador murdered abroad for the first time since 1979, it was clear that someone from the Obama administration had to show up on the Sunday TV talk shows to field questions about the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. But of all the many officials to whom the […]

AN INTERVIEW WITH MARK STEYN: ED DRISCOLL ****

http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2012/09/17/steyn-on-after-america/ Last year, as the month of August began, I received a copy of Mark Steyn’s After America from his publicist on Wednesday, the Dow Jones dropped 512 points on Thursday, and S&P shorted America’s credit rating on Friday. Mark’s crack PR team earned their keep once again this year, staging riots across the Middle […]

FRANK GAFFNEY: ISLAMISTS TIPPING POINT

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/sep/17/islamists-tipping-point/?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS History is replete with examples of strategic miscalculations in which an overreach — usually born of contemptuous disdain for a foe — led to disaster for the aggressor. Think Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 or Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union 131 years later. We may look back at Sept. 11, 2012, as […]

BRET STEPHENS: MUSLIMS, MORMONS AND LIBERALS…WHY IS IT OKAY TO MOCK ONE RELIGION BUT NOT ANOTHER? ****

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444450004578002010241044712.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
‘The Book of Mormon’ performed at New York’s Eugene O’Neill Theatre

‘Hasa Diga Eebowai” is the hit number in Broadway’s hit musical “The Book of Mormon,” which won nine Tony awards last year. What does the phrase mean? I can’t tell you, because it’s unprintable in a family newspaper.

On the other hand, if you can afford to shell out several hundred bucks for a seat, then you can watch a Mormon missionary get his holy book stuffed—well, I can’t tell you about that, either. Let’s just say it has New York City audiences roaring with laughter.

The “Book of Mormon”—a performance of which Hillary Clinton attended last year, without registering a complaint—comes to mind as the administration falls over itself denouncing “Innocence of Muslims.” This is a film that may or may not exist; whose makers are likely not who they say they are; whose actors claim to have known neither the plot nor purpose of the film; and which has never been seen by any member of the public except as a video clip on the Internet.

No matter. The film, the administration says, is “hateful and offensive” (Susan Rice), “reprehensible and disgusting” (Jay Carney) and, in a twist, “disgusting and reprehensible” (Hillary Clinton). Mr. Carney, the White House spokesman, also lays sole blame on the film for inciting the riots that have swept the Muslim world and claimed the lives of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three of his staff in Libya.

So let’s get this straight: In the consensus view of modern American liberalism, it is hilarious to mock Mormons and Mormonism but outrageous to mock Muslims and Islam. Why? Maybe it’s because nobody has ever been harmed, much less killed, making fun of Mormons.

DOROTHY RABINOWITZ: THE FOURTH ESTATE STILL THRILLING TO THE SPIRIT OF ’08

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443995604578002523312508286.html?mod=hp_opinion

The spectacle of reporters over the past week hounding Mitt Romney for speaking his mind does not come as a surprise.

After an astounding week of ardent media focus on Mitt Romney’s criticism of the initial U.S. response to mob assaults on American diplomatic outposts, the furor is dying down—but it’s not over by any means. Nor was the message that the furor sent a negligible one.Condemnations of Mr. Romney had come thick and fast. He had been “crass and tone deaf,” in the view of MSNBC’s Chuck Todd. He had committed a “slander” against the president, according to Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic.

Journalists in pursuit of this story—to the exclusion of virtually all else going on—were quick to point out that denunciations of Mr. Romney were by no means limited to Democrats, that criticism came from Republican commentators too. This fact was hardly surprising—the sanctimony of the virtuous knows no political bounds.

The spectacle of those hordes of journalists in single-minded pursuit of the Romney story day after day—days that saw the killing of four Americans, embassies burned and trashed, mobs of the faithful running amok—shouldn’t have been surprising either. It’s the most dramatic indicator yet that in this election the pack journalism of four years ago is alive, and well, and in full cry again.

Especially wonderful to hear were all the charges about Mr. Romney’s political opportunism and tone-deafness—this after three days of a Democratic convention distinguished by shameless, nonstop exploitation of the military raid that put an end to Osama bin Laden. It is impossible to imagine any other president in American history orchestrating even two minutes—much less three days—of the self-glorification and wallowing in a victory won by the nation’s armed forces that was on display at the convention. If any of this orgy of boasting in the interest of a political campaign caught the attention of those commentators whose sensibilities were so offended by Mr. Romney last week, we haven’t heard about it.

REVIEW OF DAVID SOLWAY’S BOOK GLOBAL WARMING, TRIALS OF AN UNSETTLED SCIENCE BY BARBARA KAY

http://pjmedia.com/blog/global-warning-how-gaia-replaced-god/?singlepage=true A review of frequent PJM contributor David Solway’s new book, Global Warning, Trials of an Unsettled Science. A thought experiment. You’re a jury member in a courtroom trial that will decide whether the defendant – man-made global warming advocacy – is, as it claims to be, a disinterested conduit of scientific truth, or, as […]

A SETBACK FOR GEERT WILDERS: BRUCE BAWER

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-bawer/a-setback-for-geert-wilders/print/

Last week, even as the Islamic world was erupting in yet another bout of Koran-fueled fury that put the 2006 explosion over the Danish cartoons in the shade, the Dutch electorate, apparently having decided that the clash of civilizations was yesterday’s news, handed Geert Wilders’s Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV) , or Freedom Party – the only one of the Netherlands’s several major parties that is seriously critical of Islam and of the country’s current immigration and integration policies – its first setback ever. While the two top parties received about twenty-five percent of the vote apiece, up about five percent from the last election, the PVV got ten percent, down from fifteen. It remains the third largest party, but just barely, with fifteen out of 150 seats in the House of Representatives, while the fourth, fifth, and sixth largest parties will have fifteen, thirteen, and twelve seats respectively.

“For the first time since he founded the PVV in 2004,” reported De Volkskrant on Friday, “Geert Wilders lost an election, and substantially so. How can that be?” The newspaper Trouw claimed to have the answer: “The Netherlands of 2012 is radically changed….the protest vote for the PVV has disappeared.”

On Saturday, I met Wilders’s right-hand man and fellow Member of Parliament, Martin Bosma (48), at a café in Amsterdam, to discuss the election results.

“Rumors of our death are greatly exaggerated,” he said with a tired grin. It had been a long week and he hadn’t had much sleep.

Bosma rejected the idea that the election had been a referendum on immigration – in fact, he pointed out, “immigration was not a subject during the campaign.” The PVV didn’t bring it up, and “if the PVV doesn’t bring up immigration, nobody does.” This time around, with the Euro in what seem like its death throes, the PVV decided to focus its campaign on the EU. Should the Dutch should continue to slavishly follow directives from Brussels which, among other things, compel it to cough up 56 billion euros a year to subsidize Greece and other countries? The PVV said no.

Alas, the Dutch have always been temperamentally conservative, and, as Bosma put it, “leaving the EU feels like an adventure” – a leap into the unknown. (Of course, the EU itself was an “adventure” that was foisted on them, step by step, without their approval; but now it’s the status quo, and Dutch voters are reluctant to reverse it.) And so, on Election Day, the PVV took a dive.

Still, Wilders and Bosma are in it for the long haul. “Ten years from now, everybody will agree with us,” Bosma told me. “At least about the EU. About mass immigration, I don’t know. Maybe they’ll still be in denial.”

This I frankly don’t get. How can so many Dutchmen, at this late date, still be in denial about the reality of Islamic immigration? How – especially – can they be in denial about it at a time when violent mobs are attacking Western embassies in one Muslim capital after another?

Bosma shrugged. “It’s far away,” he said about all the Middle Eastern mayhem. He gestured toward our fellow customers, most of them elite Amsterdam types sipping lattes. “Ask anybody here what they think of Islam. They’ll say that, well, there are rotten apples everywhere.”

“Even after everything that has happened?”

“Yes. They’re deluding themselves. They don’t want to face the truth. Because if you face it, you have to do something about it.”

CHARLES BYBELEZER: THE U.S IRAN DELUSION

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/charles-bybelezer/the-u-s-s-iran-delusion/ The United State of America is “not setting deadlines” on Iran and is still committed to negotiations which are “by far the best approach” to prevent Tehran from becoming a nuclear power, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared last week. To ensure the message was not lost in Hebrew translation, US State Department […]

EUROPE’S MULTICULTURAL NIGHTMARE: STEPHEN BROWN

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/stephenbrown/europe%e2%80%99s-multicultural-nightmare/print/

“The festival gives expression to our demand for a peaceful coexistence of all humans with their different cultures, languages and traditions.”

– Proclamation of the festival’s organizers.

The beautiful, rosy multicultural paradise Europe’s leftists promised in the 1960s and ’70s manifested itself brilliantly again recently at a Kurdish festival in Mannheim, a German city in the south-western state of Baden-Wurttemberg. Almost as soon as the festival began, German police were set upon by hundreds of young Kurds who were encouraged “with words and applause” by thousands of others. When the shocking, hours-long savagery ended, eighty policemen were injured, one seriously, while “more than a dozen vehicles were destroyed” before order could be restored.

Martin Boll, a spokesman for Mannheim’s police, said he had never seen such violence in his 30 years of police service.

“The outbreak of violence by the attackers was enormous,” said Boll, who was described by German newspapers as “visibly shaken” by the events. “Hundreds, if not more than a thousand Kurdish assailants stormed towards the police and threw stones at officials.”

One German newspaper said policemen had to “throw themselves down behind vehicles” in order to avoid the pavement stones, glass bottles, bricks, barricades and even firecrackers that were being thrown at them.

It was estimated 40,000 people, of whom 2,500 were regarded as “violent or violence-prepared,” attended the twentieth holding of this annual “multicultural” event. Most of the previous 19 Kurdish festivals had been held in the German state of Rhineland-Westphalia. An estimated 600,000 to 800,000 Kurds live in Germany, but Kurds had travelled from all over Europe for this year’s festival in Mannheim.

The riot began when officials of a security firm contracted by the festival’s organizers asked two policemen for assistance with a 14-year-old Kurdish youth who was refusing to give up a flag he was carrying of the banned Kurdish terrorist group, the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK). Apparently angry at the police intervention, about 100 young Kurds “suddenly attacked the two policemen from behind and kicked them in the back.” The violence escalated from there as more police and thugs were drawn in.