Displaying posts published in

September 2012

ANDREW BOSTOM: Obama, ‘The Prophet of Islam’ and Slander

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/andrew-g-bostom/obama-the-prophet-of-islam-and-slander/print/ During his speech to the UN General Assembly yesterday (Tuesday, 9/25/12) Mr. Obama proclaimed, The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam. He rapidly cloaked this bold statement regarding Islam, alone, with a pretense of ecumenism, by adding But to be credible, those who condemn that slander must also […]

DANIEL GREENFIELD: THE NEW RACIAL JUSTICE SYSTEM

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/the-new-racial-justice-system/print/ This summer, Obama issued an executive order calling for equal outcomes in school discipline policies. A racial quota system for school bullies requires that disciplinary action be handed out on the basis of race which terminates any behavior-based school discipline system. But the movement for racially equivalent outcomes is going to bigger places than […]

FJORDMANN: MUSLIM OFFENSES ARE ABOUT POWER NOT WORDS

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/fjordman/muslim-offenses-are-about-power-not-words/ The historian Nils Rune Langeland, a Professor at the University of Stavanger in Norway, dared to make some statements about possible future conflicts caused by Multiculturalism and mass immigration that the establishment, self-appointed guardians of Goodness, did not like. Frithjof Jacobsen, formerly the vocalist in a hard rock band and currently the leader of […]

DANIEL GREENFIELD:Muslim Sex Abuse of English Children Exposed

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/muslim-sex-abuse-of-english-children-exposed/ The London Times has more of the hidden papers on Muslim slave trafficking networks in the UK. They include shocking allegations, including the English girl who had been sexually abused by Muslims since the age of 12 who was offered Urdu language lessons by the local Council. I imagine the Council only wanted her […]

JOHN NOLTE: REPORT US KNEW AL QAEDA BEHIND LIBYA ATTACK WITHIN 24 HOURS…SCRAMBLING FOR A SPIN

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2012/09/26/Report-Says-US-Knew-Al-Qaeda-Behind-Libya-Attack-Within-24-Hours If these reports are true, and I suspect we all know they are — what we have here is nothing more than a scandalous White House cover up and Obama’s Media Palace Guards so terrified of Obama losing, they refuse to give it the coverage it demands, the attention it deserves, or to make […]

MATTEO RENZI: A NEW RISING STAR IN ITALIAN POLITICS IS HE A REAL REFORMER OR A HOPE AND CHANGELING?

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/matteo-renzi-pledges-sweeping-change-in-italy-a-858162.html

Matteo Renzi is on a crusade to become Italy’s next leader. With his calls for wholesale change in the political landscape, the mayor of Florence is generating excitement like few other recent Italian politicians. But his main opposition is coming from the bigwigs in his own party who would also get the boot if he won.

Last Monday, he was in Rome. A week earlier, he ploughed through northern Italy. In just two days, he made stops in 20 cities — from Mantua and Monza to Bergamo and Brescia — logging 3,250 kilometers (over 2,000 miles) in the process. Everywhere he went, the rooms were packed and the crowds were enthusiastic. Now his journey is taking him to southern Italy, starting with Naples.

The journey is being made in a white camper with the word “Adesso!”, or “Now!”, written in big letters on the exterior. Inside sits Matteo Renzi, the 37-year-old mayor of Florence. He is confident, relatively young for an Italian politician — and sparking fear within the establishment. He is determined to win this spring’s parliamentary election on his own, to become prime minister and to lead Italy for the next five years.

The resonance has been massive. More than anyone, young, Internet-savvy Italians are excited that someone is finally sounding the call to the barricades. After all, the older generation has yoked them with unemployment and debts. Even older conservatives who used to vote for former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi are jumping on the bandwagon. Fausto, for example, a self-employed construction engineer in his mid-50s, says: “If Renzi runs, he’ll get my vote!”

Fighting the Party Elders

Many of Renzi’s supporters are former left-wing voters who had stopped voting because they were disappointed by their parties. But now they are suddenly enthusiastic again. Many have donated to his online “Fai il pieno al camper” (“Fill Up the Camper”) campaign, which collects small donations in small increments starting at €5 ($6.50) to help bankroll his tour through Italy. By mid-Wednesday, the campaign had already collected almost €33,000 in donations.

Although Renzi’s campaign website already makes it seem like he’s on a triumphal procession, his race to the top has actually just begun. Before this stylish Florence native can prepare to conquer Italy, he must first win the battle to become his party’s leading candidate. To do that, he still has to win the primaries of the center-left Democratic Party (PD), an unhappy marriage of former communists and erstwhile supporters of the Christian Democracy party, which dominated Italian postwar politics until it was destroyed by corruption trials in the early 1990s.

This first step will perhaps be the hardest — particularly because not everyone in the PD is celebrating this political dynamo out of Florence. Many find him “abnormal” and “populist,” and some even detest him. The reason for this is clear: Renzi doesn’t just want to chase Berlusconi and his followers from the halls of power. He also wants to dethrone the leaders of his own party. “People who have hunkered down in parliament for 25 to 30 years cannot make decisions about our future!” he shouted at a recent political event in a marketplace. Italy needs “new faces,” he added, including in the PD. For that reason, he urges people to “consign to the garbage heap” veteran party bigwigs, including ex-Family Minister Rosy Bindi, ex-Prime Minister Massimo D’Alema, ex-party secretary Walter Veltroni — and anyone else who comes to mind. In his eyes, they all need to go. Italians need to banish the generation of politicians that arose out of the student protest movement of the late 1960s to the history books, he says.

But the people he is referring to are determined to avoid this fate. Senior PD officials and the numerous factions within the party have worked to hammer out a deal that will see Pier Luigi Bersani, the party’s current leader, nominated as the party’s leading candidate and given the party’s blessing through a series of intraparty elections similar to presidential primaries in the United States.

For the first time in a long time, the party has a chance to become the strongest political force in the country after elections in the spring. Polls currently give the PD some 27 percent of the vote. Berlusconi’s right-wing People of Freedom (PdL) party, on the other hand, is languishing below the 20 percent mark. The Northern League, the PdL’s former coalition partner, polls at between 5 and 6 percent. And even the star of Beppo Grillo, the populist comedian turned political upstart, isn’t shining so bright anymore: The polls say he would hardly win more than 15 percent of the vote.

Given these circumstances, it is entirely possible that the PD could lead the next coalition government in Rome. If that happened, Bersani would be the prime minister, but there would of course also be choice political appointments for D’Alema, Bindi and the other members of the party brass.

ROBIN SHEPHERD: WILL SPAIN BE THE FIRST EUROPEAN DEMOCRACY TO FALL?

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/1703/spain_may_win_the_race_to_be_the_first_european_democracy_to_fall Spanish democracy has never been tested at any time in its short history against the strain of such terrible (and worsening) social problems If one had to place bets on which European democracy will go down first, the temptation would surely be to dismiss the question out of hand. By which I do not […]

DANIEL GREENFIELD: THE BIG BANG IN BENGHAZI

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

The most important thing that any leader needs to know about war is that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. That includes a plan of fighting bloodless wars using drones and droning speeches.
The brilliant plan that Barack Hussein Obama and some of his more useless advisers cooked up for defeating Islamic terrorism was to isolate the “extreme” violent Islamists who want to kill people from the “moderate” political Islamists who are willing to take over entire countries in elections.

The Islamist terrorists would be deprived of a meaningful reason to kill people in the name of implementing Islamic law if their political brethren got to take over entire countries and implement Islamic law. Once the Muslim Brotherhood took over a few countries, then Al Qaeda would be marginalized and irrelevant. Its operatives would soon have to drop the terrorism and get jobs teaching about LGBT rights or building solar panels.

Whoever came up with this plan probably had a grandfather in the State Department who said in 1919 that the Communists would become less dangerous to Western Europe now that they had all of Russia to use for their economic experiments because stupidity doesn’t go away. The same old ideas that cost millions of lives a few generations ago are repackaged with some artful worldplay and are parroted by the smart set as the sort of thing that should be obvious to anyone.

Islamism, now joins Communism and Nazis on the shelf of things that we don’t really have to worry about once we’ve appeased them enough, at least until they stop taking off fingers and start biting off hands and then suddenly we have to start worrying all over again.

The problem with Obama’s split Islamists maneuver is that Al Qaeda had spent more time attacking Saudi Arabia, the most Islamist Sunni country on earth, than any other Muslim country. Turning Egypt and Syria Islamist was not going to dissuade or isolate Al Qaeda. For Islamists, there is an endless well of “extremes” so that the rise of one Islamist government is just an excuse for more Islamists to arrive and denounce them as fakes and puppets of America and Israel.

POLLS TAXING YOU? JAY COST HAS SOME NEWS

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/morning-jay-are-polls-tilted-toward-obama_653067.html

Republicans, by and large, are frustrated with recent polls of the presidential election because they think Democrats are being oversampled. Many pollsters respond by saying that “weighting” the polls for partisan identification creates its own problems and might end up skewing the polls in the wrong direction.

I am not in favor of partisan weighting, per se, although some polls like the Rasmussen poll do it in a sensible and nuanced way. So, I think the pollsters are offering a false choice between weighting and not weighting.

Furthermore, a lack of weighting creates its own problems, which many pollsters often fail to acknowledge. Specifically, many polls have, in my judgment, overestimated the Democrats’ standing right now. I base this conclusion not on a secret, black box statistical methodology or some crystal ball, but rather on a read of American electoral history going back to 1972. If I am right, then some of the polls are giving a false sense of the true state of the race, and will likely correct themselves at some point or another.

One important “tell” in my opinion, is this president’s continued weak position with independent voters, who remain the true swing vote.

Obama’s average overall margin over Romney in these same polls is roughly 4 percent. Bottom line: You do not get a four-point lead overall with a tie among independents, unless you are squeezing substantially more votes out of your base than your opponent is. And more generally, you are not “winning” an election in any meaningful sense of the word when 3/5ths of unaffiliated voters are either undecided or against you.

So, I see two ways the polls are tilted in favor of the president.

Obama’s Sequestration: Imperiling Us at Home and Weakening Us Abroad By Elise Cooper

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/09/obamas_sequestration_imperiling_us_at_home_and_weakening_us_abroad.html Muslim nations are imploding against the looming backdrop of sequestration, the trillion-dollar budget cuts mandated by the Budget Control Act, passed by Congress last year. As of January 1, 2013, half of those cuts must come from defense, which amounts to about $600 billion over a period of ten years. American Thinker interviewed experts […]