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May 2014

MY SAY: AMERICA’S EVITA PERON DID MAKE SOME HARD CHOICES- COMPLICIT IN BLAMING A VIDEO FOR ANTI AMERICAN RIOTS

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2012/09/20/Obama-admin-releases-apology-video-Pakistan

Obama State Dept Releases Apology Video in Pakistan- SEP.12, 2012

So what does the media have to say about the fact that the Obama administration is running ads on Pakistani television, during riots at the American embassy in Pakistan, showing Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton essentially apologizing for a controversial YouTube video about Mohammed? The ad shows Obama stating, “Since our founding, the United States has been a nation that respects all faiths. We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. But there is absolutely no justification for this type of senseless violence. None.” The video goes on to show Clinton stating, “Let me state very clearly, and I hope it is obvious, that the United States government had absolutely nothing to do with this video. We absolutely reject its content and message. America’s commitment to religious tolerance goes back to the very beginning of our nation.”

This is what we call appeasement.

As rioters burn flags outside our embassy in Pakistan, it is disgraceful for the State Department to use US taxpayer dollars to rip on legitimate expression under the First Amendment. And it is an apology for American values to do so.

THEN ON SEP.13 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/13/clinton-anti-islam-video-_n_1880804.html

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is sharpening her criticism of an anti-Islam video that provoked protests in the Arab world.

Clinton says the film is “disgusting and reprehensible.” She calls it a cynical attempt to offend people for their religious beliefs.

But Clinton says the U.S. would never stop Americans from expressing their views, no matter how distasteful. And she says the film is no justification for violence or attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities and personnel.

Clinton said Thursday the U.S. is monitoring protests in Yemen and elsewhere. She’s urging countries to take steps to prevent protests escalating into violence.

Faithless Execution : Impeachment is a Matter of Political Will, not High Crimes and Misdemeanors. By Andrew C. McCarthy

Note: This column is adapted from a speech I gave in New York City on May 29, announcing the publication of Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment.

Faithless Execution is about presidential lawlessness.

Specifically, my new book, which Encounter Books will release this week, is about how the Framers of our Constitution fully anticipated that a president could fail to honor his core duty to execute the laws faithfully — could fail to meet his basic fiduciary obligations to the American people.

Viewing the Obama presidency through the prism of these constitutional norms, Faithless Execution argues that we are experiencing a different kind of presidential lawlessness than our nation has ever known: a systematic undermining of our governing framework, willfully carried out by a president who made no secret of his intention to “fundamentally transform the United States of America.”

What is the president trying to transform?

Well, the constitutional framework he is undermining enshrines two core principles: separation-of-powers and accountability.

The first is the foundation of a free society. President Obama presumes the power to decree, amend, and repeal laws as he sees fit, effectively claiming all government power as his own. But as James Madison, the principal author of our Constitution, put it, “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands . . . may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” And so it is.

Accountability, the second constitutional principle at issue, is how our system holds a president singularly responsible for executive lawlessness. The Constitution vests all executive power in a lone elected official — the president. Not in the broad, dizzying array of executive-branch agencies; in the president himself.

Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi Chapter Doesn’t Really Explain Anything By Bryan Preston

“Jim Geraghty sums up what Clinton’s Benghazi chapter really comes down to:

… is to remind people that Hillary Clinton is willing to lie, quite dramatically, boldly, and shamelessly, even in ways that can be easily checked and refuted, when her political aspirations are at stake.”

Nine days after terrorists killed four Americans in Benghazi, Libya — and nine days after Clinton herself blamed the attack on a YouTube video — Hillary Clinton wants you to know that she appointed a board to investigate the attack. That, she writes, ought to count for something. Politico’s Maggie Haberman seems to agree. Haberman got the exclusive first look at Hillary’s Benghazi chapter, access that raises questions of its own.

The chapter is a mostly chronological retrospective of the attack interspersed with Clinton’s views. She points out that she ordered an investigation into what happened nine days after the attacks, and that she agreed with and implemented all 29 of the recommendations made by a review board.

Clinton hand-picked that board, which never even interviewed Clinton about Benghazi. Some review. And nine days is quite a long time for the scene of a crime/terrorist attack to get picked over and see evidence carried away or destroyed. With the 2012 presidential election just weeks after the attack, nine days was quite a long time, clearly enough time to keep the disaster from swamping the Obama campaign. Clinton had to appoint the Accountability Review Board, she had no choice. She appointed it only after she and the president and Ambassador Susan Rice had spent a fortnight blaming the attack on a video.

In addition to patting herself on the back for constructing a review that was designed not to touch her, Clinton speculates on the motives of the attackers, none of whom have been arrested yet.

“There were scores of attackers that night, almost certainly with differing motives,” she writes. “It is inaccurate to state that every single one of them was influenced by this hateful video. It is equally inaccurate to state that none of them were. Both assertions defy not only the evidence but logic as well.”

NOEMIE EMERY: IDENTITY POLITICS DEVOURS ITS CHILDREN ****

JILLARY’S WARS

Call them Jillary: as in Jill Abramson plus Hillary Clinton, two women of an age, of a kind, and of a political genre, the reigning queens of modern identity politics, each rising high and becoming a model for generations of feminists who admired their guts and brashness and gall. And call him Pinch: Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., the Prince Charles of the house of New York Times, heir to the throne of one of the few modern-day institutions that still runs on the monarchical principle in which the first son of the reigning family is given great power (deserved or not), a backer of Hillary and employer of Jill—at least until May 14, when he tossed her under the bus and then backed up and ran over her, breaking the rules set for gender-relations and setting off rows in the gender-identity complex not seen in its annals before.
Was she fired for cause? Fired for being a woman in power. Or, as the Times had often insisted when a powerful woman was under discussion, could “cause” be an issue at all? Thus in the same week when Hillary’s backers were claiming it was out of bounds for her to be questioned by men about anything that could be said to have gone wrong in her tenure as secretary of state, two units of her team were engaged in a cage match, breaking an alliance of 20 years’ standing, and putting them and their project at risk.

In the beginning, it all seemed much simpler. The early 1990s were the critical years for them all. Hillary went from being the lawyer-wife of an unknown southern governor to being first lady and feminist icon. Jill was at work on the book which would make her a player, Strange Justice, which she wrote with Jane Mayer, about the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas war of words in the course of his Supreme Court nomination. Pinch took over the Times. He hated the concept of white male privilege as only a millionaire who inherited a job passed from his great-grandfather down through the generations could do. “He was like a silversmith, noisily banging the New York Times into a shape that reflected his own values, beliefs, and personality,” wrote Alex S. Jones and Susan E. Tifft in The Trust, their 1999 book about the New York Times Company, quoting a colleague who said Pinch was “not nearly as fully formed as he appeared to be.”

Declaring diversity to be the most critical challenge facing the paper, Pinch embraced the cause of gay and lesbian rights, hired blacks as editors, critics, and columnists, promoted women, and like his employees resolutely took Anita Hill’s side in the Hill-Thomas sexual harassment showdown. This made him a good fit for Abramson, whom he would hire away from the Wall Street Journal in 1997 and whose views seemed to mirror his own: While treating liberal blacks with kid gloves and much reverence, the Times would make a practice of profiling conservatives such as Clarence Thomas and quota foe Ward Connerly as disturbed personalities whose judgment was wanting.

The new codes were drawn up by the Jills and Hil-larys in the belief that the men to be caught would all be conservatives just like Clarence Thomas, and the snaring of a president supported by feminists at first took them all by surprise. But not for long: In no time at all, the girls on the bus ditched their vulnerable, working-class sisters for the powerful male who sat in the White House. In Vanity Fair, the late and great essayist Marjorie Williams outlined the charges brought against Clinton: that he exposed himself to a state employee making $6.35 an hour (Paula Jones); that he groped a volunteer when she asked for a job that paid money (Kathleen Willey); that as president he had an affair with a 21-year-old intern who came to deliver pizza and stayed to dispense more intimate favors (Monica Lewinsky); that he used state personnel to procure sexual partners; and that he used “staff members, lawyers, and private investigators to tar the reputation of any woman who tries to call him to account” for his acts. “Can you find the problems with his behavior?” Williams then asked us. She continued:

Take your time: These problems are apparently of an order so subtle as to escape the notice of many of the smartest women in America—the writers, lawyers, activists, officeholders and academics who call themselves feminists. When news broke that Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr was investigating whether President Clinton had lied under oath .  .  . the cacophony that ensued was notable for the absence of one set of voices: the sisterly chorus that backed up Anita Hill seven years earlier when her charges of sexual harassment nearly stopped Clarence Thomas’s confirmation to the Supreme Court.

The Greatest Murder Machine in History: Mike Konrad

When one thinks of mass murder, Hitler comes to mind. If not Hitler, then Tojo, Stalin, or Mao. Credit is given to the 20th-century totalitarians as the worst species of tyranny to have ever arisen. However, the alarming truth is that Islam has killed more than any of these, and may surpass all of them combined in numbers and cruelty.

The enormity of the slaughters of the “religion of peace” are so far beyond comprehension that even honest historians overlook the scale. When one looks beyond our myopic focus, Islam is the greatest killing machine in the history of mankind, bar none.

The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. — Will Durant, as quoted on Daniel Pipes site.

Conservative estimates place the number at 80 million dead Indians.

According to some calculations, the Indian (subcontinent) population decreased by 80 million between 1000 (conquest of Afghanistan) and 1525 (end of Delhi Sultanate). — Koenrad Elst as quoted on Daniel Pipes site

80 Million?! The conquistadors’ crimes pale into insignificance at that number. No wonder Hitler admired Islam as a fighting religion. He stood in awe of Islam, whose butchery even he did not surpass.

Over 110 Million Blacks were killed by Islam.

… a minumum of 28 Million African were enslaved in the Muslim Middle East. Since, at least, 80 percent of those captured by Muslim slave traders were calculated to have died before reaching the slave market, it is believed that the death toll from 1400 years of Arab and Muslim slave raids into Africa could have been as high as 112 Millions. When added to the number of those sold in the slave markets, the total number of African victims of the trans-Saharan and East African slave trade could be significantly higher than 140 Million people. — John Allembillah Azumah, author of The Legacy of Arab-Islam in Africa: A Quest for Inter-religious Dialogue

CAROLINE GLICK: THE SHIMON PERES LEGACY

On June 10, the Knesset will elect President Shimon Peres’s successor. As he departs the President’s Residence at the end of June, the media will provide saturation coverage of his final days and tell us over and over that Peres is the greatest statesman in Jewish history. His personal gravitas is Israel’s single most important asset in the world, they will say as they warn of our bleak future without him.

The upcoming Peres-is-a-Superhero festival will just be the latest of the narcissistic, tasteless celebrations of this man, always choreographed expertly by Peres and his retinue of media groupies.

Like his 80th and 85th birthdays, Peres’s 90th birthday celebration went on for a month. As the serving president, his last two monthlong benders cost the taxpayers millions of shekels and broke the budget of the President’s Residence.

All were replete with international celebrity guests like Nelson Mandela, Bono and Bill Clinton whom the press drooled over.

Hyperventilating reporters paused between drinks to mournfully note that after Peres leaves office, the parties will end and the A-listers will stop visiting.

And that’s the problem with Peres’s showboating. It’s always been all about him, never about us.

Peres’s popularity among the jet-setters never translates into international support for the State of Israel. Israel is but a prop for him – a means of securing the continued support of the beautiful people.

Actually, it’s worse than that. Peres’s international popularity has always grown in indirect proportion to Israel’s. The more Hollywood stars he adds to his collection, the worse Israel’s international isolation.

Marine Le Pen Shopping for Allies at the EU Parliament in Brussels Part 3 Nidra Poller

American banking authorities are threatening to slap a 10 billion dollar fine on France’s top bank, BNP Paribas, accused of handling transactions in dollars from 2002-9 for customers from Iran, Cuba, and Sudan, in violation of an American embargo. What does this have to do with the Front National? Would an anti-Islamization party be shocked by the Iranian ties of our flagship bank? Or perhaps the Front National, sworn enemy of Big Finance, will be pleased to see a money-grubbing bank get its fingers slapped and its stockholders deprived of one year’s dividends?
Probably not. Marine Le Pen accuses the United States of imposing sanctions to prevent French companies from trading with Iran the better to allow American companies to prepare a bright commercial future there. At the same time she accuses France of joining the US in a veritable war on Iran.
Aymeric Chauprade has been Marine Le Pen’s foreign policy advisor since she became party president in 2011. Elected this month EU deputy from the district that includes Paris, he is expected to pilot the Group that Le Pen is striving to put together. Chauprade is eminently presentable, handsomely academic, poised and soft-spoken. He calls himself a “dissident,” replacing the Soviet Union with oppressive Western democracies. His carefully constructed discourse has all the marks of the accomplished geostrategist with a solid academic background and broad international experience. Except that it veers off into riffs about the machinations of the “Atlantico-Zionist conspiracy” alternating with lyrical passages in praise of Vladimir Putin. As he spins his fascinating tale about the real forces at work in our world, the balance of power, the sources of conflict, the causes of violence, the historical realities—e.g. Islamic jihad and its scriptural foundations—are metamorphosed into marionettes manipulated by imperialist America.
Keeping in mind that Marine Le Pen needs 2 more allies to form a 7-nation Group at the European Parliament, we may justifiably extend our inquiry into the words and deeds of her foreign policy advisor, Aymeric Chauprade. To what extent are his policies acceptable to the leaders of the four parties already allied with the Front National—Geert Wilders, Harald Wilinsky, Gerald Annemans, and Matteo Salvini?
Revelations about the Front National are often but not always found in media that could be labeled “leftwing” or “anti-fascist.” The anti-jihad discourse adopted by Marine Le Pen at the beginning of her presidential campaign led to uncritical acceptance of the Front National by thinkers and activists concerned with the dangers of 21st century Islamic conquest. Many, if not the great majority of these people were awakened to this issue by the 9/11 jihad attack against the United States. They do not appreciate being rejected as right wing racist xenophobic Islamophobes. Is the triumph of the Front National good news for them?

MARTIN SHERMAN: THE ROUT OF THE RIGHT

The Israeli leadership would do well to bear in mind that commitment to the principle of democratic governance is not a suicide pact.

Incredibly, today, except for detail in nuance and tone, the formal positions of the major “right-wing” faction, the Likud, has become indistinguishable from positions expounded by the far-left Meretz faction.

In terms of political affiliation, 51 percent of respondents said they were right-wing, 22% said they were in the Center and 27% defined themselves as left-wing. Among young people, a greater percentage called themselves right-wing than left-wing

– Recent opinion poll, “Israel today – the state of the nation,” Ynetnews, May 5.

At first glance, the findings of the poll conducted over the last week of April should be cause of great encouragement and satisfaction for the political “Right.” That is until you examine political realities and take a long, hard look at the political “Right’s” performance over the past two-and-a-half decades.

Organizational victory, ideological defeat

According to the survey, over half the population holds views presumably compatible with what might be expected of “right-wing” political platforms – almost double that found for what presumably might be expected of the political platforms of its “left-wing” rivals. No less significant, the “Right” enjoys greater support than the “Left” among the young.It seem the younger the age group, the stronger the support for the “Right.”

All of this seems to bode a rosy future for the “Right” in Israel. This, however, would be a highly simplistic – even deceptive—take on Israeli political realities. For the political outcomes that have taken place in the past, and seem probable in the future, provide a very different picture.

Although it is true that there has been serious erosion in the electoral strength of the “Left” and of its representation in the Knesset, the ideology it embraced has totally eclipsed that of its “right-wing” rivals.

After all, since the early 1990s, political realities in Israel have clearly shown that electoral victory has little bearing on the policies resultant governments will pursue.

Quite the reverse.

As I have pointed out in previous columns, the official ideology adopted by the allegedly “right-wing” Likud is demonstratively far more concessionary than that embraced by the post-Oslo Labor Party under the Nobel peace laureate Yitzhak Rabin. Yet any Israeli leader who were to adopt Rabin’s prescription for a permanent settlement with the Palestinians would be immediately dismissed as an unrealistic extremist.