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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Capitol Hill</title>
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		<title>Saving Private Kerry</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/saving-private-kerry/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=saving-private-kerry</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 19 Sep 2014 04:55:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Capitol Hill]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ISIS]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Kerry]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[senate hearing]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[The mission isn’t to destroy ISIS, it’s to protect Obama.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/891200dd-3d37-4ebc-921d-41ee28604d23-620x372.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-241306" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/891200dd-3d37-4ebc-921d-41ee28604d23-620x372-413x350.jpg" alt="891200dd-3d37-4ebc-921d-41ee28604d23-620x372" width="347" height="294" /></a>Secretary of State John Kerry didn’t appear before the Senate </span><span class="zw-portion">Foreign Relations Committee</span><span class="zw-portion"> to lay out an offensive strategy for defeating ISIS</span><span class="zw-portion">. Instead his real mission was </span><span class="zw-portion">a defensive strategy to protect Obama from critics on the right and the left.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">Obama’s delayed strategy hasn’t won over liberals and conservatives. It certainly hasn’t won over the American people. For the first time, Obama’s counterterrorism policy no longer has the support of a majority of Americans. Americans don’t believe that Obama can keep them safe. They suspect that he’s just trying to protect the last shreds of his fading popularity</span><span class="zw-portion"> by bombing ISIS</span><span class="zw-portion">. And they’re right.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">Kerry was on the defensive from the first, </span><span class="zw-portion">appeasing</span><span class="zw-portion"> </span><span class="zw-portion">Code </span><span class="zw-portion">Pink protesters there in support of ISIS, as they have in the past shown up in support of Hamas, and </span><span class="zw-portion">then taking fire from</span><span class="zw-portion"> members of the Senate from both parties.  </span><span class="zw-portion">He began his statement by appeasing Code Pink and ended it by appeasing Islam.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">His statement was layered with television friendly talking points. “We do have a clear strategy,” he insisted. The d</span><span class="zw-portion">efensive statement wa</span><span class="zw-portion">s a reference to Obama’s own disavowal of a strategy. Since then Obama, Kerry and countless administration personnel have insisted that there </span><span class="zw-portion">really </span><span class="zw-portion">is a strategy.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">Defending Obama against accusations that his delayed response had allowed ISIS to become a major threat, he claimed that, “</span><span class="zw-portion">Early this summer the ISIL threat accelerated when it effectively erased the Iraq-Syria border and the Mosul Dam fell. The President acted immediately.</span><span class="zw-portion">”</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">“Immediately” makes Obama sound proactive. Kerry’s testimony was full of similarly active language. </span><span class="zw-portion">He used the word “immediately” three times in close succession. </span><span class="zw-portion">But cheap marketing tricks can’t cover up the fact that Obama’s “immediately” kicked in when ISIS was </span><span class="zw-portion">marching on</span><span class="zw-portion"> Baghdad. That “immediately” sounds a lot like “the horse ran away and we immediately shut the burn door.” If you wait until an Al Qaeda spinoff has nearly taken over two countries, then there’s nothing immediate about your actions.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">Kerry’s statement </span><span class="zw-portion">wa</span><span class="zw-portion">s f</span><span class="zw-portion">illed with</span><span class="zw-portion"> such delayed immediacies. “</span><span class="zw-portion">Deliberately and decisively, we further surged the ISR missions immediately</span><span class="zw-portion">,” he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">In fact there was nothing decisive or immediate about it.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">Obama significantly delayed the rescue of the hostages leading to the televised beheadings. He responded with air strikes only when actual genocide had begun taking place and Iraq appeared to be on the verge of falling to ISIS.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">There’s nothing immediate about any of that.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">After boasting of the “immediacy” of the response, Kerry then walked that back claiming that the response was delayed in order to create an inclusive Iraqi government and assemble an international </span><span class="zw-portion">coalition. The international coalition consists of countries whose leaders are willing to be photographed with John Kerry.</span><span class="zw-portion"> </span><span class="zw-portion">Some might say that’s a more serious sacrifice than actually sending troops into battle.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">Or as Kerry said in his testimony, “</span><span class="zw-portion">There are more than 50 countries that already have agreed or are now doing something. Not every country will decide that their role is to have some kind of military engagement, but every country can do something</span><span class="zw-portion">.”</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">Where Bush had managed to assemble a coalition of countries willing to send ground troops, Obama and Kerry have assembled a coalition of countries for a war that won’t actually fight in the war, but will do something. What is that somet</span><span class="zw-portion">hing? It could be anything. It’s the “Do Something” coalition.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">Like everything about Kerry’s testimony, the only strategy involved i</span><span class="zw-portion">s</span><span class="zw-portion"> domestic political gamesmanship.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">The 50 number isn’t a coincidence. The </span><span class="zw-portion">“</span><span class="zw-portion">Coalition of the </span><span class="zw-portion">Willing</span><span class="zw-portion">”</span><span class="zw-portion"> had 49 members. Obama is trying to show that he can go one country more. Even if unli</span><span class="zw-portion">ke the “Coalition of the </span><span class="zw-portion">Willing</span><span class="zw-portion">”</span><span class="zw-portion"> its members won’t fight or do much of anything. But they will do “something” even if it’s issuing a press release and that will allow the media to claim that Obama has assembled a larger coalition than George W. Bush did.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">By one</span><span class="zw-portion"> country</span><span class="zw-portion">.</span><span class="zw-portion"> </span><span class="zw-portion">Of such petty cynicism is the anti-ISIS strategy woven.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">Kerry waxed enthusiastic about the accomplishments of the “inclusive” government. “</span><span class="zw-portion">The result is something also for Iraq that it’s never seen before in its history: an election deemed credible by the United Nations followed by a peaceful transition of power without any U.S. troops on the ground.</span><span class="zw-portion">”</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">And all it took was ISIS on the front lawn of Baghdad. By “peaceful transition of power”, Kerry means a transition in which th</span><span class="zw-portion">e sitting Prime Minister deployed</span><span class="zw-portion"> troops and has to be forced out by one of his own clerics</span><span class="zw-portion">. That’s not</span><span class="zw-portion"> the </span><span class="zw-portion">peaceful </span><span class="zw-portion">triumph of democracy that Kerry seems to think</span><span class="zw-portion"> it is</span><span class="zw-portion">.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">W</span><span class="zw-portion">hile US troops were not on the ground (unless you count the nearly 1,000 that officially are), the only reason </span><span class="zw-portion">for the transition was</span><span class="zw-portion"> i</span><span class="zw-portion">n exchange for US military intervention. It’s a little cynical of Kerry to claim that using the promise of military intervention is </span><span class="zw-portion">more democratic</span><span class="zw-portion"> than having US troops on the ground.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">The withdrawal from Iraq, according to Obama, would lead to an inclusive government. But instead it took the return of the United States to Iraq to bring that inclusive government into being. If Kerry were honest, he would admit that the transition actually disproves the entire Iraq policy that his boss </span><span class="zw-portion">used as his election platform</span><span class="zw-portion">. Instead he acts as if it somehow proves him right.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">Kerry needs to claim some sort of diplomatic accomplishment to explain the failure to act. </span><span class="zw-portion">The Democrats</span><span class="zw-portion"> </span><span class="zw-portion">have </span><span class="zw-portion">become comfortable with diplomatic rhetoric and uncomfortable with the use of force. Obama’s approval ratings have tumbled because he is incapable of offering strong wartime leadership. </span><span class="zw-portion"> </span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">But no speech on ISIS by any member of the administration would be complete without more Islamic revisionism.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">And </span><span class="zw-portion">Secretary of State John Kerry certainly did not disappoint.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">Kerry fumed that ISIS were “</span><span class="zw-portion">cold-blooded killers marauding across the Middle East making a mockery of a peaceful religion.</span><span class="zw-portion">” He asserted that the </span><span class="zw-portion">“</span><span class="zw-portion">Do Something</span><span class="zw-portion">”</span><span class="zw-portion"> coalition was about exposing ISIS as un-Islamic.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">“</span><span class="zw-portion">This mission isn’t just about taking out an enemy on the battlefield; it’s about taking out a network, decimating and discrediting a militant cult masquerading as a religi</span><span class="zw-portion">ous movement,” he said.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion"> </span><span class="zw-portion">“</span><span class="zw-portion">We must continue to repudiate the gross distortion of Islam that ISIL is spreading</span><span class="zw-portion">,” Kerry whined. That would be the gross distortion </span><span class="zw-portion">spread by</span><span class="zw-portion"> Mohammed and </span><span class="zw-portion">his followers through </span><span class="zw-portion">the Koran.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">Repudiating it would be a good start, but it would also be considered blasphemy. And the followers of Islam, like ISIS, respond to such repudiations with threats of violence and actual violence.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">The real mission of the “Do Something” coalition isn’t to destroy </span><span class="zw-portion">ISIS;</span><span class="zw-portion"> it is to protect the reputation of Islam. Kerry’s real mission in the Senate wasn’t to lay out a strategy for defeating ISIS, but to protect the reputation of Obama. If the strategy is out to lunch and the mission </span><span class="zw-portion">seems</span><span class="zw-portion"> vague, it’s because the real action isn’t taking place in Iraq, but in Washington. It’s not about defeating ISIS. It’s about perpetuating the disastrous policies that allowed it to become so big and so powerful.</span></p>
<p>*</p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><em>Don&#8217;t miss  Shillman Journalism Fellow <strong>Daniel Greenfield</strong> on this week&#8217;s Glazov Gang discussing <strong>&#8220;ISIS Rising&#8221;</strong>:</em></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/9E8gGysQZzU" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
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		<title>Caroline Glick Briefs Capitol Hill on the Gaza War</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/caroline-glick-briefs-capitol-hill-on-the-gaza-war/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=caroline-glick-briefs-capitol-hill-on-the-gaza-war</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 31 Jul 2014 04:46:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[The Freedom Center's Israel Security Project Director explains the current conflict in terms of the failed two-state solution. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em>Below is the video of Caroline Glick&#8217;s July 25th briefing on Capitol Hill on Israel&#8217;s Operation Protective Edge. The presentation is followed by a Q&amp;A session: </em></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/m4Ki_C8JKzA" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
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		<title>Christians Unite for Israel in Washington</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/jim-fletcher/christians-unite-for-israel-in-washington/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=christians-unite-for-israel-in-washington</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 26 Jul 2013 04:30:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jim Fletcher]]></dc:creator>
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		<category><![CDATA[christians for israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[CUFI]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[An impassioned defense of the Jewish State. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/flet.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-198228" alt="flet" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/flet.jpg" width="280" height="210" /></a>Thousands of participants at the 8<sup>th</sup> Annual Christians United for Israel Summit waved Israeli and American flags Tuesday night, as CUFI’s “Night to Honor Israel” put a spectacular cap on a gathering that critics and friends alike call “a beast.”</p>
<p>Judging from the conversations, both in hallways and on the dais, where Malcolm Hoenlein—who delivered a thundering address Tuesday afternoon—rubbed elbows with evangelical leader John Hagee, the San Antonio pastor, who has mobilized more than one million people to advocate for Israel under the CUFI umbrella, seemed upbeat. In an address before the Summit participants, he reminded all of the positives:</p>
<p>“The Holocaust ended in statehood,” said the man who began developing close ties with Israeli and American Jewish leaders decades ago.</p>
<p>David Brog, a former Washington attorney (and cousin of Ehud Barak), is executive director of CUFI, and he used a breakout session to deliver a masterful response to those who say the Arab-Israeli conflict is a result of what the Left call the Occupation.</p>
<p>“It’s absurd on the face of it,” Brog said, delivering a clear and concise history of the region since 1948. Noting that the PLO was formed in 1964—three years before Israel took the West Bank, Golan Heights, and Sinai in a defensive war—Brog provided participants with plenty of information to answer charges they hear back home in their churches.</p>
<p>On Tuesday afternoon, in a ballroom session titled “Middle East Briefing,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the gathering, and noted his long friendship with Hagee:</p>
<blockquote><p>“What an achievement! I salute you. You are an oasis of support for Israel, and we have no better friends than you, anywhere on the globe.”</p></blockquote>
<p>In an interesting response that seemed to resonate with Christians who are becoming aware of an infiltration of the Palestinian narrative into American churches, Israeli Tourism Minister Uzi Landau said that “Arab money and the radical Left” have fueled media attacks on Israel. The comment showed a growing awareness of the problem, as CUFI Western Regional Director Randy Neal outlined similar problems to hundreds of college students Sunday afternoon. More than ever, there was sense at this CUFI Summit that the era of unchallenged attacks from the Left is over.</p>
<p>House Majority Leader Eric Cantor related a dual story that underscored the difference in the cultures of jihadists and those who oppose them. Cantor said that he had been part of a delegation that heard a detailed briefing on the Iron Dome project, which has saved thousands of Israeli lives during rocket attacks from Gaza.</p>
<p>Cantor said that the designer of the Dome, distraught when a single rocket claimed the life of an Israeli, went “back to the lab” to perfect the defense shield. Cantor noted that this stood in stark contrast to a Palestinian woman from Gaza who was treated in an Israeli hospital, but upon returning for a follow-up visit, she was stopped at a checkpoint, where her bomb belt was discovered. The woman had planned to blow up the very doctors and nurses that had saved her life.</p>
<p>Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish organizations, relished the opportunity to inject a more aggressive response to critics of Israel, telling the participants: “The Jewish lobby is a myth; it’s our job to make it a legend!” Hoenlein also knew what type of language would resonate with the CUFI Summit participants when he said, “Don’t bet against the Jews.”</p>
<p>Many in attendance were brought to tears by the address delivered by Richard Kemp, commander of British forces in Afghanistan. Kemp began by revealing his own Christian faith, and invoked the name of another legend, whom he called “The greatest Christian Zionist in Britain.” He went on to say that he had, that morning, spoken to Orde Wingate. Many in the crowd smiled but were puzzled.</p>
<p>“I spoke to him this morning at Arlington,” Kemp said. Wingate, the British major-general who was a Christian Zionist, helped train what would become the Haganah, the forerunner of the Israel Defense Forces. Wingate was killed in a plane crash in India, in 1944, but remains a beloved figure for Israelis and their American supporters.</p>
<p>Kemp delivered an impassioned defense of Israel that brought many in the room to tears. He mentioned several of Israel’s major battlefield achievements, calling the 1976 Entebbe rescue, “The most breathtaking special forces operation the world has ever seen.”</p>
<p>Kemp also referred to the CUFI Summit as a “remarkable event,” and indeed it was. Jews and Christians alike were moved by such displays as the “Wall of Remembrance,” which profiled the 1,000 Israelis killed by jihadist terrorism since 2000.</p>
<p>On Wednesday, participants met with their representatives on Capitol Hill.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Desperate Holder Throws Underlings Under the Bus</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/desperate-holder-throws-underlings-under-the-bus/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=desperate-holder-throws-underlings-under-the-bus</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 16 May 2013 04:52:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[How long can the embattled Attorney General hang on? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/0514-eric-holder-ap_full_600.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-189672" alt="0514-eric-holder-ap_full_600" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/0514-eric-holder-ap_full_600-450x322.jpg" width="270" height="193" /></a></p>
<p>[<strong>To order the Freedom Center&#8217;s pamphlet &#8220;Ten Reasons to Impeach Eric Holder,&#8221; written by Department of Justice whistleblower J. Christian Adams, click <a href="https://secure.donationreport.com/productlist.html?key=WY6LJDB7J48Y">here</a>.]</strong></p>
<p>In <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2325076/Eric-Holder-faces-congressional-grilling-IRS-investigation-Boston-bombing-Benghazi-spying-journalists-phone-records-scandal-fever-sweeps-Washington.html">testimony</a> before the House Judiciary Committee yesterday, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder reinforced the notion that he is unfit to remain in office. Although he was grilled about many of the scandals afflicting the Obama administration, the seizure of phone records from the Associated Press (AP) remained the major concern for both Republicans and Democrats. Holder made it clear they were <a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2013/05/15/holder_on_ap_scandal_i_was_not_the_person_involved.html">wasting</a> their time trying to get answers about the investigation from him. “I was not the person involved in that decision,” he insisted. “I was recused in that matter as I described in a press conference held yesterday. The decision to issue this subpoena was made by the people presently involved in the case.&#8221;</p>
<p>Holder said he <a href="http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2013/05/15/holder-testifies-house-panel-gathering-phone-records/20iY1XRHoif4S3zHdOP8kK/story.html">recused</a> himself from the probe because &#8220;I am a possessor of information eventually leaked.&#8221; He expressed faith in the ability of those looking into the leaking of top-secret information to the AP. the leak revealed details of a CIA operation in Yemen that undermined an al Qaeda plot to get an underwear bomber on a jetliner. &#8220;I have faith in the people who actually were responsible for this case, that they were aware of the rules and that they followed them,&#8221; Holder said. &#8220;But I don’t have a factual basis to answer the questions that you have asked, because I was recused.&#8221;</p>
<p>That was an understatement. Holder wasn&#8217;t even able to answer the most basic questions about the investigation. He couldn&#8217;t say why the DOJ didn&#8217;t follow the standard practice of negotiating with the AP before issuing the subpoenas. &#8220;That I don&#8217;t know,&#8221; he responded to the question posed by Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI). &#8220;There are exceptions if the integrity of the investigation would be impacted. I don&#8217;t know why that didn&#8217;t happen.&#8221; Sensenbrenner <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/holder-95-99-certain-deputy-ag-authorized-subpoena-acting-my-stead_724558.html">asked</a> him who authorized the subpoena, &#8220;because the code of federal regulations is pretty specific that this is supposed to go as close to the top as possible.&#8221; Holder was noncommittal, claiming he was &#8220;probably 95 percent, 99 percent certain the deputy attorney general acting in my stead was the one who authorizes the subpoena.&#8221; After being handed a note, he confirmed that &#8220;the (Deputy Attorney General James Cole) was the one who authorized the subpoena.&#8221; Sensenbrenner expressed frustration regarding Holder&#8217;s evasiveness, suggesting administration officials travel to the Harry Truman Presidential Library and take a photo of the famous sign, &#8220;the buck stops here.&#8221;</p>
<p>The Congressman then explained why. &#8220;There doesn&#8217;t appear to be any acceptance of responsibility for things that have gone wrong,&#8221; he said.</p>
<p>Holder couldn&#8217;t even say for certain when he recused himself. &#8220;I&#8217;m not sure, I think it was towards the beginning of the matter. I don&#8217;t know exactly when, but it was towards the beginning of the matter,&#8221; he told Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL).  Despite this complete lack of knowledge, Holder remains supportive of the seizure of two months of phone records via a secretly issued subpoena, because the aforementioned story involved &#8220;a very serious leak, a very grave leak.&#8221;</p>
<p>What Holder leaves out is the reality that this leak, as well as the ones regarding the president’s “kill list” of terror suspects, the Stuxnet virus used to foil Iranian nuclear ambitions, and the <a href="http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2012/05/25/why-isnt-undersecretary-of-defense-michael-vickers-being-prosecuted-for-outing-seal-team-6s-commander/">leaking</a> of classified information about SEAL Team 6 to Hollywood producers by Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Michael Vickers were remarkably consistent in one respect: they all accrued to Barack Obama&#8217;s efforts to appear &#8220;tough on terror&#8221; leading up to the 2012 election. Thus, it would stand to reason someone in the Obama administration was the source of the leaks for which AP phone records were secretly subpoenaed. It would be useful to know who has been subpoenaed on the other side of this equation&#8211;or who hasn&#8217;t, making the seizure of AP phone records necessary.</p>
<p>Democrats were willing to offer Holder cover on the issue. Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) was delighted that Republicans were now interested in media protection, considering a shield law died in the Senate in 2009. Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) criticized the &#8220;hue and cry&#8221; raised by the same Republicans who, last year, &#8220;wanted reporters subpoenaed, put in front of grand juries&#8221; in an effort to stop leaks. Apparently Conyers forgot that Democrats have controlled the Senate since 2006, and Nadler is unable to fathom the difference between overt and covert subpoenas, as well as the difference between grand jury testimony and a secret DOJ investigation.</p>
<p>Holder was grilled on the additional scandals surrounding the administration, including the potential lapses in intelligence sharing prior to the Boston Marathon bombings, and the IRS&#8217;s targeting conservative groups for special scrutiny.</p>
<p>With regard to the Boston bombings, Holder asserted that the DOJ&#8217;s investigation had been &#8220;thorough.&#8221; Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, disagreed, contending there was &#8220;troubling information&#8221; leading to the conclusion that the federal agencies involved in the investigation &#8220;failed to connect the dots.&#8221; “It does not appear that all of the information was received by all the pertinent parties, particularly the FBI,” the congressman said. When Goodlatte asked what the DOJ is doing about procedure regarding hits in terror databases, Holder  sidestepped the question, saying only that there is an ongoing inspector general investigation.</p>
<p>Holder was further <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2013/05/15/holder-and-gohmert-go-full-contact-in-house-fight-over-boston-bombings/">challenged</a> by Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), who wondered what the FBI did, or didn&#8217;t, pursue after receiving Russian intelligence indicating Tamerlan Tsarnaev had become radicalized. “A lot of people are concerned about profiling, but there are a lot more people concerned about getting blown up by a terrorist,” Gomert contended.</p>
<p>Holder responded angrily to Gomert&#8217;s assertion. “Unless somebody has done something inappropriate, you don’t have access to the FBI files, you don’t know what the FBI did,” Holder said. “You simply do not know.&#8221;</p>
<p>Neither does anyone else at this point, and given the DOJ&#8217;s track record regarding other administration investigations, such as the one over Fast and Furious, it is more than likely any revelations about who knew what and when will be stonewalled.</p>
<p>Holder was equally vague regarding the IRS scandal. Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=50146898n">inquired</a> if the investigation would be far reaching, &#8220;including Washington, D.C.,&#8221; if necessary. Holder promised to go &#8220;wherever the facts take us.&#8221; On the other hand, he said it would take time to determine if there was &#8220;criminal&#8221; wrongdoing.</p>
<p>Late yesterday afternoon, it appeared that timeline would get even longer. Around 6 p.m. EDT, the president announced that Treasury Secretary Jack Lew had accepted the <a href="http://www.marketwatch.com/story/obama-says-acting-irs-commissioner-resigned-2013-05-15">resignation</a> of acting IRS commissioner Steve Miller. Obama characterized the &#8220;misconduct&#8221; detailed in the just-released Inspector General report about the IRS&#8217;s handling of conservative tax exempt applications as &#8220;inexcusable.&#8221; It remains to be a seen if Miller will be part of Holder&#8217;s investigation into IRS malfeasance, or simply be allowed to fade into oblivion.</p>
<p>The progressive media have <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2013/05/15/media-matters-sides-with-justice-dept-says-ap-sounds-like-it-should-be-investigated/">already begun</a> circling the wagons around the Attorney General. Media Matters insisted the secret seizure of AP phone records was a necessity. “If the press compromised active counter-terror operations for a story that only tipped off the terrorists, that sounds like it should be investigated,” they contended.</p>
<p>So should Media Matters&#8217; relationship with the DOJ. Internal DOJ emails <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2012/09/18/emails-reveal-justice-dept-regularly-enlists-media-matters-to-spin-press/">obtained</a> in 2012 by the<i> Daily Caller </i>revealed the leftist advocacy group regularly collaborated with the DOJ to attack reporters who covered DOJ scandals. Tracy Schmaler, Office of Public Affairs Director for the Justice Department, worked with Media Matters staffers to attack a number of prominent journalists, including Townhall Magazine’s Katie Pavlich, <a href="http://Breitbart.com/">Breitbart.com</a> writers Joel Pollak and Ken Klukowski, Fox News&#8217;s  William LaJeunesse, Judge Andrew Napolitano, Megyn Kelly, Martha MacCallum, Bill Hemmer, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, and National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy. Former DOJ Civil Rights Division attorneys J. Christian Adams and Hans von Spakovsky were also attacked.</p>
<p>The<i> Daily Caller</i> obtained the emails after filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that was fulfilled long after the 20-business-day limit required by law.</p>
<p>Moreover, the Office of Public Affairs has no business conducting a political operation. Its function is to keep the public informed about what the DOJ is doing to enforce the laws. That it was more than willing to violate its mandate is a good indication of how deep the rot at the DOJ goes.</p>
<p>Yesterday, Eric Holder did what he does best whenever he appears before a Congressional Committee: provide as little information as possible, become indignant when anyone suggests he has acted improperly, and fob responsibility for every possible impropriety conducted by his department onto someone else&#8211;when he&#8217;s not busy stonewalling scandals. Even a contempt of Congress citation for his refusal to provide critical information in the Fast and Furious gunrunning debacle that resulted in the death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, along with <i>hundreds</i> of Mexican nationals, including children, has failed to chasten his contempt for the rule of law, or his determination to maintain the most ideologically-compromised Department of Justice in modern history.</p>
<p>Holder can only serve as long as he maintains the support of President Barack Obama. That he still does, speaks volumes&#8211;about <i>both</i> men.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Flashback: Anwar al-Awlaki Leading Muslim Prayers on Capitol Hill, 2002</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/robert-spencer/flashback-anwar-al-awlaki-leading-muslim-prayers-on-capitol-hill-2002/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=flashback-anwar-al-awlaki-leading-muslim-prayers-on-capitol-hill-2002</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 24 Dec 2012 04:20:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Robert Spencer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[anwar al awlaki]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[New video evidence indicting the allegedly "moderate" Muslim community. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/robert-spencer/flashback-anwar-al-awlaki-leading-muslim-prayers-on-capitol-hill-2002/awlakicapitolhill/" rel="attachment wp-att-170635"><img class="wp-image-170635 alignleft" title="AwlakiCapitolHill" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/AwlakiCapitolHill-425x350.jpg" alt="" width="272" height="224" /></a>In 2002, PBS produced a documentary on the life of Muhammad, <em>Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet</em>. I wrote in a <a href="http://old.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-spencer121902.asp" target="_blank">National Review article</a> at the time that the documentary presented an &#8220;attractively packaged, sanitized version of Islam.&#8221; It features Islamic apologist Karen Armstrong; Daisy Khan, the <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2011/01/ground-zero-mosques-daisy-khan-calls-for-dialogue-continues-to-ignore-our-invitation-to-dialogue.html" target="_blank">deeply</a> <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2010/10/sharif-el-gamal-contradicts-daisy-khan-on-ground-zero-mega-mosque.html" target="_blank">deceitful</a> <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2010/08/dialogue-daisy-khan-islamic-supremacist-mega-mosque-imams-wife-lies-about-and-defames-ex-muslim-hero.html" target="_blank">&#8220;moderate&#8221;</a> who shot to national prominence in the Ground Zero mosque controversy, and others of that ilk.</p>
<p>But now Jihad Watch reader Carolynn has alerted me to the fact that it is also noteworthy for capturing the slain jihad terror mastermind Anwar al-Awlaki, who was in contact with Major Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood jihad mass murderer; Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the <a id="_GPLITA_1" title="Click to Continue &gt; by Text-Enhance" href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2012/12/flashback-anwar-al-awlaki-leading-muslim-prayers-on-capitol-hill-2002.html#">Christmas</a> underwear jihadist; and others, leading Muslim prayers on Capitol Hill. Screenshots above show the minute mark where you can see him in the video.</p>
<p>Of course, the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/19/us/nation-challenged-american-muslims-influential-american-muslims-temper-their.html?src=pm" target="_blank">New York Times</a> hailed al-Awlaki on October 19, 2001 as one of &#8220;a new generation of Muslim leader capable of merging East and West,&#8221; and so he was widely reputed to be a &#8220;moderate&#8221; at the time, but that&#8217;s just the point. One of the supposed &#8220;gotcha&#8221; quotes that Leftists and Islamic supremacists like to use against me is one in which I said that there is &#8220;no distinction in the American Muslim community between peaceful Muslims and jihadists.&#8221; This video, however, shows that to be absolutely true: no one was getting up and walking out on al-Awlaki, or saying he shouldn&#8217;t be preaching or leading the prayers. Many argue that al-Awlaki really was &#8220;moderate&#8221; then and became &#8220;radicalized&#8221; later, but even then, there is no record of his former friends and associates repudiating his new &#8220;radical&#8221; views.</p>
<p>What we do not see is Muslims in the U.S. pronouncing takfir on those who believe in the Islam of al-Awlaki &#8212; that is, declaring them non-Muslim and excluding them from Muslim communities. The reality is that one who holds to the idea that jihad (violent and non-violent) must be waged against Americans in order to impose Sharia upon them is not put out of American mosques, and those who by their actions earn the media title of &#8220;extremist&#8221; move freely among Muslims in the U.S. until they commit their act of &#8220;extremism.&#8221;</p>
<p>More evidence comes from the same PBS documentary. For also present for al-Awlaki&#8217;s sermon was Hamas-linked CAIR&#8217;s Nihad Awad, and I believe that the gentleman to Awad&#8217;s left is his henchman Ibrahim &#8220;Honest Ibe&#8221; Hooper:</p>
<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/robert-spencer/flashback-anwar-al-awlaki-leading-muslim-prayers-on-capitol-hill-2002/awadhoopercapitolhill/" rel="attachment wp-att-170636"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-170636" title="AwadHooperCapitolHill" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/AwadHooperCapitolHill-430x350.jpg" alt="" width="430" height="350" /></a></p>
<p>Awad and Hooper, of course, are routinely cited in the mainstream media as if they were &#8220;civil rights leaders.&#8221; And also present was another man who had been an <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=717" target="_blank">employee of Hamas-linked CAIR</a>: Randall Todd &#8220;Ismail&#8221; Royer, who is now serving a <a href="http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2004-01-16-terror-group_x.htm" target="_blank">20-year sentence for jihad terror plotting</a>. In this screenshot he is on the right:</p>
<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/robert-spencer/flashback-anwar-al-awlaki-leading-muslim-prayers-on-capitol-hill-2002/ismailroyercapitolhill/" rel="attachment wp-att-170637"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-170637" title="IsmailRoyerCapitolHill" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/IsmailRoyerCapitolHill-432x350.jpg" alt="" width="432" height="350" /></a></p>
<p>So if there is a distinction in the Muslim community between peaceful Muslims and jihadists, it certainly wasn&#8217;t evident at this Capitol Hill prayer meeting, where a jihad mass murder mastermind preached the khutba for a group containing a jihad terror plotter, two leading &#8220;moderate&#8221; Muslim spokesmen, and a congressman&#8217;s chief of staff.</p>
<p>Full video:</p>
<p><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/t3xvC05Xb0g" frameborder="0" width="420" height="315"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Obama&#8217;s Crony Capitalism</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/michellemalkin/obamas-crony-capitalism/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-crony-capitalism</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 25 May 2010 04:04:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Michelle Malkin]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Chicago's ShoreBank is too politically connected to fail.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/obamatoast.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-60951" title="obamatoast" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/obamatoast-235x300.gif" alt="" width="235" height="300" /></a></p>
<p>&#8220;No more bailouts, no more greed, how many profits do you need?&#8221; That&#8217;s been a signature chant of community organizers and Big Labor thugs who have stormed <a href="http://www.creators.com/opinion/michelle-malkin.html#" target="_blank">bank</a> offices and financial executives&#8217; private homes decrying corporate welfare over the past several months. But now that the federal government and a coalition of big banking interests are poised to bail out a crony Chicago bank with longtime ties to the Obama administration, Saul Alinsky&#8217;s avenging angels are nowhere to be found.</p>
<p>ShoreBank is a Windy City investment bank with all the right (or, rather, left) ties. Its stated progressive mission isn&#8217;t merely to make good lending decisions, but to engage in Barack Obama-esque social engineering to &#8220;create economic <a href="http://www.creators.com/opinion/michelle-malkin.html#" target="_blank">equity</a> and a healthy environment.&#8221; The ShoreBank corporate slogan: &#8220;Let&#8217;s change the world.&#8221;</p>
<p>The company website features a video of Obama in Kenya championing ShoreBank microlending projects overseas. ShoreBank has also touted itself as a &#8220;green&#8221; bank from its founding days — promoting dubious carbon credit programs, subjecting new borrowers to eco-litmus tests (&#8220;we look at how you use water, how you recover water and clean it, how you use energy, if you produce clean energy, how you manage CO2, whether you are offsetting CO2 that your product produces, if you are using sustainably produced materials&#8221;) and encouraging customers to participate in &#8220;EcoDeposits&#8221; to &#8220;directly support the green agenda.&#8221;</p>
<p>Social and environmental justice may make for good Volvo bumper stickers. They do not, however, make for a good bottom line. While the bank was on do-gooder missions around the world, business at home was in trouble. As The Wall Street Journal reported, &#8220;Losses racked up during the recession have left the bank facing a demand to raise new capital or face likely closure by regulators.&#8221;</p>
<p>Enter the Chicago political friends and family of ShoreBank. The ties are long and deep, as the Central Illinois 9/12 Project has been chronicling for months:</p>
<p>— ShoreBank co-founder Jan Piercy was a Wellesley College roommate of Hillary Clinton&#8217;s, who has long supported the bank along with former president Bill Clinton.</p>
<p>— Former ShoreBank Vice Chairman Bob Nash worked for Mrs. Clinton&#8217;s presidential bid as deputy campaign manager. Board of Directors member Howard Stanback is a Hyde Park neighborhood pal of President Obama, who served with Stanback on the board of the radical Woods <a href="http://www.creators.com/opinion/michelle-malkin.html#" target="_blank">Fund</a> (where Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers also sat).</p>
<p>— White House senior advisor Valerie Jarrett served on the board of Chicago Metropolis 2020 with ShoreBank Director Adele Simmons, former president of the liberal MacArthur Foundation, where she focused on &#8220;climate change&#8221; and &#8220;global governance&#8221; issues.</p>
<p>— The bank and its employees donated some $12,000 to the Obama 2008 presidential campaign, and co-founder Mary Houghton reportedly gave advice to Obama&#8217;s late mother about small business lending issues.</p>
<p>In other words: ShoreBank is too politically connected to fail.</p>
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<p>And now you, the taxpayer, may be on the hook for helping its cronies engineer a special rescue. Fox Business News reported this week that a consortium of large lenders — including Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and GE Capital — have partnered with the feds to pitch in a combined $200 million public-private bailout. (In addition, Illinois Democrat Rep. Jan Schakowsky has been crusading for a state-level bailout of the beleaguered bank.) The buzz on both Wall Street and Capitol Hill is that Goldman and perhaps others in the public-private partnership were pressured to lend a hand.</p>
<p>It wouldn&#8217;t be the first time that businesses have felt the Obama squeeze. And it wouldn&#8217;t be the first time that Democrats exploited the financial crisis to milk public money for their banking cronies.</p>
<p>The laggardly House Ethics Committee is still investigating Democrat California Rep. Maxine Waters, who had a personal and financial stake in Boston-based OneUnited, a minority bank that received $12 million in TARP bailout money under smelly circumstances. The bank&#8217;s executives donated $12,500 to her congressional campaigns. Her husband, Sidney Williams, was an <a href="http://www.creators.com/opinion/michelle-malkin.html#" target="_blank">investor</a> in one of the banks that merged into OneUnited. Waters secured meetings between OneUnited execs and Treasury Department officials.</p>
<p>That probe has dragged on for nearly a year, which doesn&#8217;t bode well for fresh GOP demands for an investigation into the shady ShoreBank bailout. House Financial Services Committee ranking minority member Spencer Bachus, R-Ala., has demanded that the White House cough up documentation about any possible overt contact with Goldman about the deal.</p>
<p>Team Obama is smarter than that, of course. To quote Obama&#8217;s environmental czar Carol Browner, who pressured <a href="http://www.creators.com/opinion/michelle-malkin.html#" target="_blank">auto</a> industry execs last year to cooperate on a fuel standards increase, they know &#8220;to put nothing in writing, ever.&#8221;</p>
<p>The fingerprints may be missing, but the stench of the Chicago Way is impossible to cover up.</p>
<p><em>Michelle Malkin is the author of &#8220;Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks &amp; Cronies&#8221; (Regnery 2010). Her e-mail address is malkinblog@gmail.com.</em></p>
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		<title>Endless War</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jamie-glazov/endless-war-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=endless-war-2</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 16 Apr 2010 05:03:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jamie Glazov]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Ralph Peters reflects on how we can effectively combat an enemy that we're afraid to name.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/peters2.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-58246" title="peters2" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/peters2.jpg" alt="" width="316" height="474" /></a></p>
<p>Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Ralph Peters, a retired Army officer and the author of 25 books, including best-selling, prize-winning novels and influential works on strategy. He is also an opinion columnist for the New York Post and a regular contributor to Armchair General Magazine. A popular media guest, he became Fox News&#8217; first strategic analyst in 2009. He is the author of the new book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/product-description/0811705501/ref=dp_proddesc_0?ie=UTF8&amp;n=283155&amp;s=books" target="_blank">Endless War: Middle-Eastern Islam vs. Western Civilization.</a></p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Ralph Peters, welcome to Frontpage Interview.</p>
<p>Tell us about your new book.</p>
<p><strong>Peters:</strong> Thanks Jamie.</p>
<p>My new book focuses on cutting through the ideological nonsense perverting our national discussion of war, peace, terrorism and justice.  My fight is to force people to deal with facts, rather than allowing them to make up cozy myths about humanity&#8211;or the inhuman creatures we call &#8220;terrorists.&#8221;  Really, the key to the entire book lies in the introduction, which lays out the terrible price we&#8217;re paying for allowing the left to take over our education system and destroy (and virtually eliminate) the teaching of history.  That means we get legislators who vote in an intellectual vacuum, journalists who can&#8217;t put the things they witness into context, and voters susceptible to wild lies.  As the book says, those who do not know history will die of myth.  And nowhere in the current yelling contest that passes for a national debate is myth more powerful than in the refusal to accept that Islamist terrorists really do exist and really do believe that they&#8217;re doing their god&#8217;s will.  So I try to base my judgements and make my cases on historical facts&#8211;the sort that are not subject to dispute (except by the left&#8217;s myth-makers, of course).</p>
<p>Beyond that, the book&#8217;s a world tour of our problems&#8211;not merely recounting them, but trying to understand why the problems have emerged and why it&#8217;s so difficult for us to combat them.  It may sound self-contradictory, but I&#8217;d describe the book as a work of &#8220;impassioned rationality.&#8221;  And by the way: I don&#8217;t toe anybody&#8217;s line.  I want to challenge independents and conservatives to think for themselves, too, since we&#8217;re so terribly susceptible, as a species, to group-think.  The herd mentality is an even greater enemy than al-Qaeda.  So I&#8217;m willing to risk unhappy readers&#8211;as long as I can spur them to think for themselves.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Why your subtitle?</p>
<p><strong>Peters: </strong>(He said with a laugh) Every non-fiction book has to have a sub-title these days, doesn&#8217;t it?  For example, Nancy Pelosi&#8217;s forthcoming autobiography, NANCY!  How I Turned a Bad Date With America into an Awful Marriage While Turning Men Into Mice on Capitol Hill&#8230;</p>
<p>Seriously, it&#8217;s an interesting question, since, in a sense, this book could have been written at any point since the seventh century, when Islam began its endless jihad.  Of course, the details would have been different, but not the overall theme: That you have to fight Islamist fanatics to the death, there&#8217;s no alternative.  That said, had the book been published at any time prior to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the sub-title would have been different, it would have been &#8220;Middle-Eastern Islam vs. Christian Civilization,&#8221; rather than &#8220;Western Civilization.&#8221;  But the West, overall, is no longer Judeo-Christian, except in heritage.  The USA excepted, we&#8217;re a secular civilization, with all the good and ill that brings along.  So that&#8217;s one more asymmetry in the current struggle: We fight for values, our enemies fight for faith.</p>
<p>The first third of the book recounts the high points (and low points) of the long military struggle with Islam, as I try to arm the reader with facts to refute the utter nonsense that &#8220;Islam&#8217;s a religion of peace.&#8221;  I document some of the most-important battles and campaigns&#8211;exciting to read about, but often grim in their results&#8211;over the centuries, looking at Islam&#8217;s centuries of military triumphs that almost destroyed our civilization, then the recent centuries in which the tide turned as Islam failed to compete as a civilization.  Those tales from history are fun to read (God knows, the left hates the thought that history might offer interesting stories that teach us something), but they&#8217;re also essential to understanding the deep roots of today&#8217;s wars.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>What is wrong with the U.S. approach toward our enemy? How must we change it?</p>
<p><strong>Peters: </strong>We refuse to recognize our enemy or call him by his name (I think, always, of Goethe&#8217;s line from Faust, &#8220;Wer darf das Kind beim rechten Namen nennen?  &#8220;Who dares to call the child by its true name?&#8221;).  Recently, President Obama promised a Muslim audience that he&#8217;d eliminate any reference to Islamist terrorists or the like from our national security documents.  Good Lord!  It&#8217;s as if, in World War II, we decided we couldn&#8217;t utter the word &#8220;Nazi,&#8221; since it might hurt our enemy&#8217;s feelings.  Our mortal enemies are jumping up and down, screaming that they&#8217;re terrorists in the name of Islam.  Our response?  &#8220;Oh, they don&#8217;t really mean it&#8230;&#8221;  Yeah, well, they do mean it.  Not every Muslim is a problem, but some Muslims certainly are.</p>
<p>How can we effectively combat an enemy when we&#8217;re even afraid of the enemy&#8217;s name?  This is political correctness beyond the bounds of sanity.  So another thing the book does is to dissect the twisted language our government and even our military now uses to avoid acknowledging that fanatical religion is the crucial factor in our current struggles.  It&#8217;s astonishing: We have generals who insist that Islam isn&#8217;t involved in any of this, and doctrinal manuals that ignore religion.  We refuse to apply common sense: If you could subtract Islam from the problem, you just wouldn&#8217;t have al Qaeda or the Taliban.  They&#8217;re fighting for other factors, too, of course.  But Islam is the primary motivator, the primary sustainer, and the primary objective.  Pretending otherwise just kills our troops for nothing&#8230;although, sadly, both political parties are fine with that, as long as we don&#8217;t offend anybody.  (And this is a key point: While the Democrats are the worst offenders, plenty of Republicans in Washington are outright cowards on this issue.)</p>
<p>The book makes it clear that Islam was born by the sword, spread by the sword, and still reverts to the sword when under stress.  And it makes the case using historical facts, not rhetoric.</p>
<p>All that said, I do want to make it perfectly clear: I don&#8217;t believe that each and every Muslim spends each and every day dreaming up ways to kill us.  The problem lies among those who find their faith a spur to violence, the fanatics, the true believers who want to return the world to a &#8220;pure Islam&#8221; that never really existed (Wahhabism is an eighteenth century Bedouin heresy posing as the one true Islam).  But we don&#8217;t understand them, either.  For example, the book dissects our idiotic counterinsurgency doctrine&#8211;our guidebook for Afghanistan&#8211;which not only doesn&#8217;t mention Islam, but can&#8217;t tell the difference between ideological revolutionaries and religious reactionaries.  In Afghanistan&#8211;which is discussed at length&#8211;we&#8217;re the revolutionaries, the ones trying to bring change.  Our enemies are fighting for traditions, myths and darkness.  We&#8217;re muddled, befuddled and failing.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Obama appears to be bullying and abandoning Israel. Meanwhile, we have the horror of a nuclear Iran on our hands, and their first target will be Israel. What must Israel do, now that, it appears, it is alone?</p>
<p><strong>Peters: </strong>On a recent Fox broadcast, I made the point that I don&#8217;t believe the Obama administration would respond militarily even if Iran popped a nuke on Israel.  The situation&#8217;s hateful to me, but this administration will not defend Israel.  Obama is already resigned to the advent of an Iranian nuclear-weapons capability.  The sanctions nonsense is just window dressing, at this point.  So what does that mean?  At some point, Israel will feel compelled to act pre-emptively&#8230;but Israel only has the capability to set back, not to destroy, Iran&#8217;s nuke program (which is widely dispersed, buried deep and/or located in heavily populated areas).</p>
<p>The Israeli strike will be a bloody mess, the Iranians will respond asymmetrically by closing the Straits of Hormuz and hitting Gulf oil fields and infrastructure, and we&#8217;ll be stuck defending Arab autocracies&#8211;while avoiding resolute military action against Iran.  At best, the situation would be catastrophic.  Obama&#8217;s just hoping it doesn&#8217;t happen on his watch&#8211;and he&#8217;ll do all he can to discourage Israel from defending itself as long as he&#8217;s in the White House.  At this point, it&#8217;s clear that Obama finds Israel distasteful and that his sympathies lie with the Arabs.  The US now has a president with a Third-World outlook locked in the 1970s campus prejudices of his youth.  But, then, at no time in his past has Obama had a pro-Israel friend I can identify.  Throughout his lifetime, his public associates have been pro-Palestinian.  He is who he is.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Your thoughts on the Obama administration and how it is or isn’t dealing with the terror war and protecting U.S. national security.</p>
<p><strong>Peters:</strong> I do give the Obama administration credit for continuing and even expanding the Bush administration&#8217;s use of drones and other means to target terrorists on foreign soil.  Obama knows he can&#8217;t afford&#8211;politically speaking&#8211;a major terrorist attack on the US during his presidency.  He&#8217;s not protecting America, he&#8217;s protecting his career and the historical legacy his acolytes are already engraving in marble.  Beyond that, Obama&#8217;s actions across the board amount to a negative for our national security.  He&#8217;s a leftwing ideologue who prefers developing-world thugs to our traditional allies.  And he&#8217;s a narcissistic fool.  Obama&#8217;s most dangerous quality is his unbounded faith in his own charisma.</p>
<p>The next few years will be interesting.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>You&#8217;re a hardworking writer, every five seconds or so you have some new piece of work out. What&#8217;s your next book?</p>
<p><strong>Peters: </strong>This one will be very different.  I recently finished another novel, The Officers&#8217; Club, set on an Army post in the early 1980s.  It&#8217;s scheduled for publication next January.  It&#8217;s R-rated, and it could as readily have been called Lieutenants Behaving Very, Very Badly.  It&#8217;s set at a time when the Army was still recovering from Vietnam, our society was still reeling from the excesses of the 1970s, and Reagan had just taken the helm.  That was the battered Army in which I grew up&#8230;strait-laced on duty, but wild after hours&#8230;  On one level, the novel&#8217;s a murder mystery&#8211;it begins with the murder of a female lieutenant&#8211;but, really, it&#8217;s my memorial to a bygone Army, the good, the bad and the ugly.  Today&#8217;s military is much, much better (and certainly better-behaved).  But I&#8217;ve just never seen a well-written book about &#8220;my&#8221; Army.  The book will surprise those who know me only through my writing on strategy and security&#8211;but, fair warning, the next book after that will be even more surprising.  Writing&#8217;s an adventure.  Just like life.  When you become predictable, it&#8217;s time to pack it in.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Well, I’m very much looking forward to reading this book for sure!</p>
<p>Ralph Peters, thank you for joining us.</p>
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		<title>Religious Left Targets Tea Party “Hate”</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/mark-d-tooley/religious-left-targets-tea-party-%e2%80%9chate%e2%80%9d/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=religious-left-targets-tea-party-%25e2%2580%259chate%25e2%2580%259d</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/mark-d-tooley/religious-left-targets-tea-party-%e2%80%9chate%e2%80%9d/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 01 Apr 2010 04:03:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark D. Tooley]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[But who are the real haters?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/tea-party-signs.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-56850" title="tea-party-signs" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/tea-party-signs.jpg" alt="" width="540" height="405" /></a></p>
<p style="text-align: left;">Perpetuating the mythology of hateful and racist Tea Party zealots, United Church of Christ and United Methodist officials are attacking the demonstrators outside the Capitol who protested the March 21 vote for Obamacare.</p>
<p>“I have been watching the activities of the Tea Party for months curious about their underlying motives,” intoned the Rev. Geoffrey A. Black, president of the 1.1 million member United Church of Christ.  He condemned Tea Party demonstrators for having “spit upon” Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) and having “shouted names that we have not heard in the public square since the days of the Civil Rights movement,” which are a “disgrace to our nation&#8217;s civility.”</p>
<p>While it is theoretically possible that out of thousands of demonstrators, a few could have shouted nasty epithets, so far no evidence has been produced, despite a multitude of videos.  A video of the alleged spitting incident seems to show an effusion of spittle from shouting, not intentional spitting.  Cleaver referred to the ostensible spitter as the man &#8220;who allowed saliva to hit my face.&#8221;</p>
<p>Despite the dearth of any proof, the Religious Left climbed aboard immediately with the worst assumptions based primarily on their own projected stereotypes of conservatives.  The UCC’s Rev. Black insisted that he was “not surprised because I have long suspected that racism and homophobia are some of the underlying motives.”   He called upon his “brothers and sisters in the United Christ of Christ and our faith partners to resist entering into dialog or debate with such demonstrations of hate that go against our Christian understanding to love our neighbors.”</p>
<p>For many on the Religious Left, there are nostalgic memories of, or wished for fantasies about, having marched for social justice in the 1960’s.  For them, any resistance to their statist agenda must have behind it another Bull Connor or Mayor Daley.  Having largely abandoned Christian orthodoxy, the Religious Left’s cosmology is essentially political, with conservatives representing the demonic, and leftists the angels of light ushering in salvation.  This conflation of religion with politics does not allow much room for recognizing possible good intentions among political adversaries.</p>
<p>While the UCC is typically further left politically, officials of the 7.9 million United Methodist Church organized a virtual full court press against the supposed hatefulness of the anti-Obamacare Tea Partiers.   The United Methodist News Service even issued a special bulletin that repeated unquestioningly that anti-Obamacare demonstrators shouted “racial epithets” at black congressmen and a sexual orientation slur at Congressman Barney Frank.</p>
<p>“It saddens me, the acrimonious debate both in Congress and in the public at large,” bemoaned United Methodist Bishop Gregory Palmer, president of his denomination’s Council of Bishops. “We have failed to carry on serious debate without personal attacks and name-calling.”  Palmer was among other left-leaning religious officials who publicly urged Obamacare’s passage.</p>
<p>The troubled head of the United Methodist Commission on Religion &amp; Race viewed the Tea Party protesters as “sobering examples that show racial- and gender-based hate remain active ingredients in U.S. social life.’”  The United Methodist News Service also quoted activist Gil Caldwell, a retired United Methodist minister, who disclaimed: “It ought to be obvious now to most persons, that even as all Americans have the right and responsibility to critique presidents and members of Congress, some few people have allowed their un-reconstructed racism to come forth as they exercise their right to protest.”  Ominously, he wondered:  “What doth God expect of the church in such a time as this?”</p>
<p>As United Methodism’s chief lobbyist on Capitol Hill, and a leading Obamacare proponent (though disappointed that it doesn’t go far enough towards full socialized medicine), JimWinkler issued a formal, nearly 500 word statement blasting supposed Tea Party hatred.  “This past weekend’s appalling display by protesters in Washington, D.C., demonstrates the overtly racist message of too many of the so-called “Tea Party” members,” Winkler tut-tutted.  He hailed Congressman Cleaver’s “deep faith and love for humanity” for not having pressed charges against the alleged spitter.</p>
<p>Winkler, as a full-time Religious Left social justice lobbyist, had more condemnation for the Tea Partiers than he’s had for regimes around the world that have murdered thousands of their own people.  Meanwhile, Winkler’s agency frequently endorses demonstrations not always punctilious in their civility.  On the same day as the Obamacare vote, pro-immigration and pro-open borders marchers also descended on the Capitol, with the active endorsement of Winkler’s United Methodist Board of Church and Society.</p>
<p>A United Methodist layman, Roy Beck, head of an anti-amnesty group called NumbersUSA, was present to interview pro-immigration demonstrators for his organization’s website.  Once a prominent journalist with <em>The United Methodist Reporter</em>, the church’s largest circulation publication, Beck’s approach is factual and methodical.  But he and his film team were surrounded by orchestrated and harassing march organizers with whistles, some of them dressed as mimes, and many of them pushing balloons at Beck declaring “Don’t Debate Hate”  While Beck tried to conduct interviews, the mimes and friends shoved, blocked the camera and frantically blew their whistles ad nauseum to drown out Beck and his interviewees.  (Some video is <a href="http://www.numbersusa.com/content/resources/video/special-events/stop/seiu-fosters-hatred-while-roy-embraces-civility.html">here</a>, and <a href="http://www.numbersusa.com/content/resources/video/special-events/stop/mimes-wont-let-pro-amnesty-protesters-talk-roy.html">here</a>.)</p>
<p>Unlike the spitting and racial epithet allegations aimed at Tea Partiers, Beck’s treatment by the immigration march organizers was carefully recorded.  But do not expect any expressions of concern from the Religious Left, especially those who endorsed the immigration march and its “Don’t Debate Hate” mimes.</p>
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		<title>ObamaCare On the March</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/obamacare-on-the-march/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamacare-on-the-march</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/obamacare-on-the-march/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 22 Mar 2010 05:30:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[A bad bill is passed by even worse means. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/f3bc80e69629408aa924ec70d1a3cd20.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-55390" title="APTOPIX Health Care Overhaul" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/f3bc80e69629408aa924ec70d1a3cd20.jpg" alt="" width="410" height="398" /></a></p>
<p>It took a seedy campaign of intimidation, <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/nov/30/the-300-million-louisiana-purchase/">bribery</a>, and back-room deal-making worthy of Tammany Hall, but Democrats have nearly pulled off the radical transformation of the American health care system that they – if not the rest of America – so desperately desire.</p>
<p>With yesterday’s <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703775504575135440191025592.html">219-to-212 party-line House vote</a>, made possible by the last-minute collapse of a holdout block of anti-abortion Democrats led by Michigan Rep. Bart Stupak, the federal government’s intrusion into one-sixth of the economy is one step closer to becoming a reality. All it cost the Democratic majority was the prospect of fiscal responsibility, the pretense of bipartisanship, and any remaining confidence that the American public may have had in its elected representatives.</p>
<p>Sunday’s legislative “victory” was achieved despite the flaws of the House health care bill, which are by now well-documented. Of these the most notable is the staggering ten-year price tag for the legislation: $940 billion, complete with tax increases totaling $400 billion. Even in its enormity, that figure does not factor in the expensive new federal bureaucracy that the bill would create. For instance, some 16,500 new IRS workers will be <a href="http://www.wcax.com/Global/story.asp?S=12179683">needed</a> to collect, examine and audit the new tax information that families and small businesses will have to provide to comply with the bill’s provisions. Nor does it include the penalties – up to $700 in some cases – that Americans will be forced to pay lest they fail to purchase insurance.</p>
<p>Billions in new entitlement spending may seem troubling, especially during an economic recession, but Democrats have sought to dismiss any anxiety about the health care bill’s effect on the deficit. To that end, Democrats spent the week gleefully touting the Congressional Budget Office’s projection that the House bill would reduce the deficit by $138 billion over ten years. If CBO projections could be taken at face value, that would be encouraging news. But as the <em>Washington Post</em> <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/18/AR2010031805445.html">reported</a>, the real budget outlook is far more dire, since the CBO’s estimates are based on the expectation of savings and cuts that may not come to pass. Medicare is a prime example. While CBO estimates factor in cuts in Medicare reimbursements, such cuts are politically unlikely and, indeed, no Congress in recent history has dared to make them. Assuming that those cuts will take place this time around is little more than wishful thinking. As it stands, the health care overhaul seems more likely to confirm another of the CBO’s projections: that public debt will rise to 90 percent of GDP by 2020 under President Obama’s budget.</p>
<p>As awful as the substance of the House bill is, the process by which it was passed may be even worse. By embracing a series of shady procedural stratagems – from the dubiously constitutional “deem and pass,” in which the Senate version of the health care bill would be deemed to have passed without the formality of an actual vote, to “reconciliation,” usually reserved for budgets of bills that are already law – Democrats sowed widespread distrust and even alienated some media allies. At the height of the health care subterfuge, even the <em>Washington Post</em> was stirred to editorialize against the Democrats’ “<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/15/AR2010031503156.html">unseemly</a>” tactics. If last night’s vote was, as House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer <a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0310/34767.html">suggested</a>, the conclusion of “a national conversation” on health care, it was a conversation carried on largely without the nation.</p>
<p>This go-it-alone arrogance, magnified with unprecedented media coverage, sheds light on the profound cynicism that has set in with the American public. A new NBC News/<em>Wall Street</em><em> Journal </em>survey finds that <a href="http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/wsjnbcpoll03162010.pdf#page=14">76 percent</a> of Americans do not trust the U.S. Congress. That distrust extends to health care. Polls show that the plurality of the American public opposes the health care reform efforts in Congress – a striking statistic when one considers that the need for the reform was one of the few original points of consensus in the health care debate. With their scorched-earth campaign to pass the bill, Democrats have almost singlehandedly destroyed a once-promising political landscape. The Tea Party protestors who flocked to Capitol Hill yesterday to voice their opposition were only the most visible sign of the public’s sour mood.</p>
<p>To be sure, ObamaCare is not yet the law of the land. The companion legislation to the House bill still needs approval in the Senate. There, the Democrats’ majority is far more tenuous, thanks to the recent of Massachusetts’s Scott Brown on the campaign pledge of opposing ObamaCare. But if the House vote sets any kind of precedent, it is that Democrats will stop at nothing to force through their signature legislation.</p>
<p>Whatever the ultimate outcome of the health care battle, the democratic process has clearly become a casualty. The American public is more cynical about its government that at any time in recent history. Next fall’s elections may yet bring a measure of retribution for the Democrats’ overreach. But by then the damage – all $940 billion of it – may be irreparably done.</p>
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		<title>Nancy Pelosi&#8217;s Deficient Cleaning Service</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/michellemalkin/nancy-pelosis-deficient-cleaning-service/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=nancy-pelosis-deficient-cleaning-service</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 16 Mar 2010 04:04:35 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Michelle Malkin]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[The House Speaker has done nothing to drain Washington's scandal-filled swamp.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/large_080325_nancy_pelosi_quell_infighting.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-54669" title="Pelosi Convention" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/large_080325_nancy_pelosi_quell_infighting.jpg" alt="" width="453" height="321" /></a></p>
<p>&#8220;Maybe it will take a woman to clean up the House,&#8221; Nancy Pelosi boasted before the 2006 midterm elections. Looks like those XX chromosomes didn&#8217;t give her much advantage over the old cleaning crew. The swamp she was supposed to drain is overflowing. And fewer than four years after a sordid sexual predation scandal involving a creepy congressman rocked the Republican Party, a sordid sexual predation scandal involving a creepy congressman is now rocking the Democratic Party.</p>
<p>The same questions that dogged House leaders then are dogging House Speaker Pelosi now: What did she and her staff know, and when did they know it?</p>
<p>On Thursday afternoon, by a vote of 402-1, the House overwhelmingly passed a privileged resolution offered by the Republican leadership demanding a formal House Ethics Committee investigation of Pelosi and her (mis)handling of harassment allegations concerning disgraced former New York Rep. Eric Massa. The soft-on-corruption ethics panel (see under &#8220;Rangel, Charlie&#8221;) had decided to shut down its investigation after Massa abruptly resigned on Monday.</p>
<p>But with reports piling up on how Massa kept a Capitol Hill playhouse filled with young, low-paid male staffers, and how Pelosi&#8217;s office had fielded complaints of his bizarre and inappropriate behavior back in October, the House decided to pry the lid back open and put a stop to what the resolution calls the &#8220;public ridicule&#8221; the seeming cover-up has invited.</p>
<p>Housecleaner Pelosi cannot be pleased by the second-guessing of her handiwork. Color her an un-merry maid. Even Democratic Rep. Patrick Kennedy, fresh from his raving House floor meltdown over media coverage of the Massa mess, voted for the GOP-initiated House resolution. Finally: Bipartisanship we can believe in!</p>
<p>With the exception of lone Democratic Rep. Chaka Fattah who voted &#8220;no&#8221; and 27 members (including those who sit on the House Ethics Committee) who voted &#8220;present&#8221; or &#8220;not voting,&#8221; every other member of Pelosi&#8217;s House supported the petition to direct the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct to investigate fully &#8220;which House Democratic leaders and members of their respective staffs had knowledge prior to March 3, 2010 of the aforementioned allegations concerning Mr. Massa, and what actions each leader and staffer having any such knowledge took after learning of the allegations.&#8221;</p>
<p>The resolution stipulates that &#8220;numerous confusing and conflicting media reports that House Democratic leaders knew about, and may have failed to handle appropriately, allegations that Rep. Massa was sexually harassing his own employees have raised serious and legitimate questions about what Speaker Pelosi as well as other Democratic leaders and their respective staffs were told, and what those individuals did with the information in their possession.&#8221;</p>
<p>Democratic Rep. Barney Frank, who earned a House Ethics Committee slap on the wrist in 1990 after using his congressional office to fix parking tickets for male prostitute Steven Gobie, was one of those leaders in the know. After voting for the resolution, he disclosed for the first time that Massa had invited one of his young staffers to dinner. &#8220;Although this was not an ethical violation,&#8221; Frank said in a published statement, one of his senior staffers was informed of the dinner and alerted Massa&#8217;s Chief of Staff Joe Racalto.</p>
<p>In other words: Frank&#8217;s office knew it smelled illicit. And Frank would know.</p>
<p>Racalto went on to contact Pelosi&#8217;s office directly in October. Tick, tick, tick. Five months later, in the wake of Massa&#8217;s own self-professed proclivity for tickle parties and victim/witness accounts of Massa&#8217;s alleged sexual assaults on his Navy underlings, Pelosi is pooh-poohing the scandal: &#8220;I have a job to do and not to be the receiver of rumors.&#8221; Translation: Don&#8217;t bother me with concerns about my members&#8217; indiscretions. I&#8217;m busy. How quickly we&#8217;ve accelerated from the &#8220;most ethical&#8221; House ever to &#8220;see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.&#8221;</p>
<p>There was a time when Pelosi the protector held House leaders to the highest standards and expectations in guarding young people working on Capitol Hill. During the GOP Mark Foley scandal, she inveighed: &#8220;The children who work as Pages in the Congress are Members&#8217; special trust. Statements by the Republican Leadership indicate that they violated this trust when they were made aware of the Internet stalking of an underage Page by Mr. Foley and covered it up for six months to a year.&#8221;</p>
<p>Yet, she remains silent on the plight of the 20-somethings with whom Massa was keeping house under circumstances that rate an Ick Factor of 10-plus. Massa&#8217;s alleged targets are someone&#8217;s children, too.</p>
<p>Deflecting accountability for her own office&#8217;s violations of trust, Pelosi feigned sympathy for Massa and attributed his impaired ethical judgment to his medical condition (he has cancer). &#8220;Poor baby,&#8221; she said through gritted teeth. He&#8217;s &#8220;a very sick person.&#8221; So, what&#8217;s Pelosi&#8217;s excuse?</p>
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		<title>Stimulus or Sedative?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/thomas-sowell/stimulus-or-sedative/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=stimulus-or-sedative</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 10 Mar 2010 05:09:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Obama won’t leave the economy alone long enough for it to recover. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/6a00d8341c4df253ef0105370f7897970b-800wi.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-53871" title="6a00d8341c4df253ef0105370f7897970b-800wi" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/6a00d8341c4df253ef0105370f7897970b-800wi.jpg" alt="" width="413" height="310" /></a></p>
<p>Abraham Lincoln once asked an audience how many legs a dog has, if you called the tail a leg? When the audience said &#8220;five,&#8221; Lincoln corrected them, saying that the answer was four. &#8220;The fact that you call a tail a leg does not make it a leg.&#8221;</p>
<p>That same principle applies today. The fact that politicians call something a &#8220;stimulus&#8221; does not make it a stimulus. The fact that they call something a &#8220;jobs bill&#8221; does not mean there will be more jobs.</p>
<p>What have been the actual consequences of all the hundreds of billions of dollars that the government has spent? The idea behind the spending is that it will cause investors to invest, lenders to lend, and employers to employ.</p>
<p>That was called &#8220;pump priming.&#8221; To get a pump going, people put a little water into it, so that the pump will start pumping out a lot of water. In other words, government money alone was never supposed to restore the economy by itself. It was supposed to get the private sector spending, lending, investing and employing.</p>
<p>The question is: Is that what has actually happened?</p>
<p>The stimulus spending started back in 2008, during the Bush administration, and has continued under the Obama administration, so it has had plenty of time to show what it can do.</p>
<p>After the Bush administration&#8217;s stimulus spending in 2008, business spending on equipment and software fell— not rose— by 28 percent. Spending on durable goods fell 22 percent.</p>
<p>What about the banks? Four months after the Trouble Asset Relief Program (TARP) poured billions of dollars into the banks, the biggest recipients of that money made 23 percent fewer loans than before. A year later, the credit extended by American banks as a whole was down— not up— by more than $20 billion.</p>
<p>Spending in general was down. The velocity of circulation of money fell faster than it had in half a century.</p>
<p>Just two weeks ago, the <em>Wall Street Journal</em> reported, &#8220;U.S. banks posted last year their sharpest decline in lending since 1942.&#8221; You can call it a stimulus, if you want to, just as you can call a tail a leg.</p>
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<p>But the actual effect of what is called a &#8220;stimulus&#8221; has been more like that of a sedative.</p>
<p>Why aren&#8217;t the banks lending, with all that money sitting there gathering dust?</p>
<p>You don&#8217;t lend when politicians are making it more doubtful whether you are going to get your money back— either on time or at all. From the White House to Capitol Hill, politicians are coming up with all sorts of bright ideas for borrowers not to have to pay back what they borrowed and for lenders not to be able to foreclose on people who are months behind on their mortgage payments.</p>
<p>President Obama keeps telling us that he is &#8220;creating jobs.&#8221; But more and more Americans have no jobs. The unemployment rate has declined slightly, but only because many people have stopped looking for jobs. You are only counted as unemployed if you are still looking for a job.</p>
<p>If all the unemployed people were to decide that it is hopeless and stop looking for work, the unemployment statistics would drop like a rock. But that would hardly be a solution.</p>
<p>What is going on, that nothing seems to work?</p>
<p>None of this is new. What is going on is what went on during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Money circulated more slowly during the 1930s than during the 1920s. Banks lent out a smaller proportion of the money they had on hand during the 1930s than they did in the 1920s. Anti-business rhetoric and anti-business policies did not create business confidence then, any more than it does now. Economists have estimated that the New Deal prolonged the depression by several years.</p>
<p>This is not another Great Depression, at least not yet, and the economy may recover on its own, if the government will let it. But Obama today, like FDR in the 1930s, cannot leave the economy alone. Both have felt a need to come up with one bright idea after another, to &#8220;do something.&#8221;</p>
<p>The theory is that, if one thing doesn&#8217;t work, it is just a matter of trying another. But, in an atmosphere where nobody knows what the federal government is going to come up with next, people tend to hang on to their money until they have some idea of what the rules of the game are going to be.</p>
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		<title>The True Face of J Street</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/moshe-phillips/the-true-face-of-j-street-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-true-face-of-j-street-2</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 09 Mar 2010 05:03:37 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Moshe Phillips]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Is it really "pro-Israel" to call out for talks with Hamas?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/heschelgreen.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-53732" title="heschelgreen" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/heschelgreen.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="329" /></a></p>
<p>J Street, the controversial pressure group, explains on the &#8220;About Us&#8221; page on its official website that &#8220;J Street is the political arm of the pro-Israel, pro-peace movement.” Since its inception in 2008, J Street has undergone growth that must be considered no less than remarkable.</p>
<p>In large part, the success of J Street has occurred without any serious investigations into how this group grew so incredibly fast and just where it came from.</p>
<p>Jeffrey  Goldberg, writing for <em>The Atlantic </em>on October 27, 2009, stated “J Street grew organically, and continues to grow organically.” Goldberg’s essay was published during J Street’s first conference. The conference was held near Capitol Hill and 1,500 delegates attended. An October 29m, JTA news service report stated “activists had meetings in 210 of the 535 lawmakers&#8217; offices on the Hill, including about 100 meetings with the lawmakers themselves…”</p>
<p>Organic? How could such a new group create such a powerful infrastructure and nurture such impressive contacts so quickly? There should be no doubt that J Street came from somewhere. The question is from where?</p>
<p>The  statement on the &#8220;<a href="http://www.jstreet.org/about/about-us">About Us</a>&#8221; page goes on to state:</p>
<blockquote><p>“J Street was founded to change the dynamics of American politics and policy on Israel and the Middle East. We believe the security and future of Israel as the democratic home of the Jewish people depend on rapidly achieving a two-state solution and regional comprehensive peace. Our mission is to promote meaningful American leadership to achieve peace and security in the Middle East and to broaden the debate on these issues nationally and in the Jewish community.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>On J Street  website’s “Myths and Facts about J Street” page, J Street declares:</p>
<blockquote><p>“J Street&#8217;s Advisory Council consists of over 170 prominent Americans &#8211; including three Former Members of Congress, 28 Rabbis, a number of former Jewish community leaders and professionals, and many others.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Researchers with the Philadelphia Chapter of Americans For A Safe Israel/AFSI initiated a study of the rabbis connected to J Street in order to understand just what the backgrounds of “former Jewish community leaders” involved in J Street are. What light can be shed on J Street’s agenda by examining its structure and organization?</p>
<p>Being Philadelphia based, AFSI researchers had prior familiarity with many of these players. A large number of J Street rabbis have played senior leadership roles in the Pennsylvania based Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and the locally headquartered network of Jewish Renewal organizations. A cadre of these individuals were also leaders of the now defunct Philadelphia chapter of New Jewish Agenda, which was specifically noted for its radical stance &#8212; even in that radical group.</p>
<p>The results  of the AFSI research into these rabbis is startling.</p>
<p>A JTA report from October 25, 2009 stated that “The left-wing lobby J Street is absorbing Brit Tzedek v&#8217;Shalom&#8217;s chapters and rabbinic wing.”</p>
<p>The national president of Brit Tzedek v&#8217;Shalom at the time of the merger was Steve Masters. Masters is a Philadelphia attorney and a former leader of the Philadelphia Chapter of the New Jewish Agenda. Jeremy Ben-Ami, the executive director of J Street, was introduced by Masters at a local kick-off event in Philadelphia on February 4, 2010.</p>
<p>Many of Brit Tzedek v&#8217;Shalom’s rabbis were among the founders and key activists of New Jewish Agenda including Rabbi Gerald Serotta, Arthur Waskow, Rabbi Everett Gendler and others. Serotta, Waskow and Gendler are also all involved in a group called Jewish Fast For Gaza – but more on that later. Waskow attended the February 4, 2010 event also.</p>
<p>It is well worth noting that many of these rabbis were first involved in an organization called Breira (meaning alternative) that was universally opposed by almost all sectors of the American Jewish community. I. L. Kenen the founder of AIPAC claimed that Breira &#8220;undermined U.S. support for Israel.&#8221;</p>
<p>The majority of Brit Tzedek v&#8217;Shalom/J Street rabbis hold radical views that go far past anything that even Breira advocated in its hay day.</p>
<p>Half of the  rabbis on J Street’s Advisory Council were members of Brit Tzedek v&#8217;Shalom’s  Rabbinic Cabinet &#8211; before the merge.</p>
<p>There is a very significant overlap between the rabbis from Brit Tzedek v&#8217;Shalom and the Jewish Fast for Gaza group. Fast for Gaza made its first public announcement in July 2009. Rabbi Brian Walt was listed as the contact for the group’s initial press release. Walt is a member of Brit Tzedek v&#8217;Shalom’s Rabbinic Cabinet.</p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.fastforgaza.net/statement">Fast  for Gaza group purpose</a> is &#8220;To call upon Israel, the US, and the international community to engage in negotiations without pre-conditions with all relevant Palestinian parties &#8211; including Hamas &#8211; in order to end the blockade…&#8221;</p>
<p>Here are  the facts:</p>
<p>More than half of the seventy-eight rabbis listed on the Fast for Gaza website are also members of Brit Tzedek v&#8217;Shalom’s Rabbinic Cabinet. Put another way, about 12.5 % of all of Brit Tzedek v&#8217;Shalom’s Rabbinic Cabinet are involved with the Fast for Gaza and call for talks with Hamas.</p>
<p>For example, Rabbi Arthur Green is listed by J Street as an Advisory Council member. Green is a former dean of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (RRC) and was a prominent member of Breira. Another Advisory Council member is the former president of RRC, Rabbi David A. Teutsch. Rabbi Mordechai Liebling, a former director of the Jewish Reconstructionist Federation, is on Brit Tzedek v&#8217;Shalom’s Rabbinic Cabinet and is a “Rabbinical Supporter of the Fast for Gaza”. Teutsch too attended J Street’s February 4, 2010 event.</p>
<p>Breira. New Jewish Agenda. Brit Tzedek v&#8217;Shalom. Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. Is J Street really just old wine in a new bottle? Has this wine turned to vinegar? Where are the likes of I. L. Kenen among today’s American Jewish leaders to stand up to J Street? An article on the website of the <em>Forward</em> newspaper (December 9, 2009) states that Israel&#8217;s Ambassador Michael Oren recently publicly labeled J Street as &#8220;a unique problem in that it not only opposes one policy of one Israeli government, it opposes all policies of all Israeli governments. It&#8217;s significantly out of the mainstream&#8230;&#8221;</p>
<p>Ambassador Oren should have been applauded for his statement. And loudly. After all, shouldn’t it be apparent to even the casual observer that forces within the highest echelons of the Obama Administration and/or the Democratic Party are assisting J Street, or perhaps even pulling its strings?</p>
<p><em>Moshe Phillips is a member of the Executive Committee of the Philadelphia Chapter of Americans for a Safe Israel/AFSI. The chapter&#8217;s website is at: <a href="http://mail.google.com/mail/www.phillyafsi.com" target="_blank"><span style="text-decoration: underline;">phillyafsi.com</span></a> and Moshe&#8217;s blog can be found at <a href="http://phillyafsi.blogtownhall.com/" target="_blank"><span style="text-decoration: underline;">phillyafsi.blogtownhall.com</span></a>.</em></p>
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		<title>Religious Left Rallies for Obamacare’s Final Stand</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/mark-d-tooley/religious-left-rallies-for-obamacare%e2%80%99s-final-stand/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=religious-left-rallies-for-obamacare%25e2%2580%2599s-final-stand</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 05 Mar 2010 05:00:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark D. Tooley]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Worshipping at the altar of the state.]]></description>
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<p>The Religious and Evangelical Left, plus the Islamic Society of North America and a few others, are making a final Custer-like stand on behalf of much cherished Obamacare.  In an ad featured in <em>The Hill</em>, a Capitol Hill newspaper aimed at congressional staffers, a religious coalition called “Faithful Reform in Health Care” demanded that Congress “complete the task at hand on behalf of the millions who are left out and left behind in our current health care system.”</p>
<p>Supposedly, these insistent religious groups speak on behalf of millions of religious Americans, most of whom are politically more conservative than the general population.  If Americans as a whole reject Obamacare, then almost certainly most religiously active Americans oppose Obamacare.  Presumably, the various bishops and other ostensibly important clerics who signed this ad are hoping that Capitol Hill readers will not realize that most church goers don’t look to Episcopal or Lutheran or Methodist bishops for wise political counsel.</p>
<p>“Opportunities to comprehensively address our broken health care system are rare,” the pro-Obamacare religious coalition insisted with a typical sense of panic. “Decades of failed attempts at reform testify to the difficulty of this task, and we know that the current effort has not been easy. However, we now stand closer than ever before to historic health care reform. Turning back now could mean justice delayed for another generation and an unprecedented opportunity lost.”</p>
<p>Foisting government control of the health care system on America is so urgent that lawmakers are implicitly implored to disregard their constituents’ views.  The old Religious Left, now joined by the emerging Evangelical Left, typically joined by left-wing Catholic groups and the oddly paired Islamic Society, has insisted for much of the last century that biblical social justice equals nearly unrestricted statism.  “We are communities of faith who have supported comprehensive health care reform for decades,” they noted with accuracy in their ad.  “We have also offered vocal support – and occasional constructive criticism – of the health care reform effort over the last year.”</p>
<p>In truth, the Religious Left et al would prefer a Canadian/British style single payer system rather than trifle with Obamacare’s more complicated preservation of private insurance under tight federal control.  But the Religious Left rightly understands that Obamacare’s incrementalism likely would lead to more total government subjugation. So they are willing to be patient.  “We know that no comprehensive health care reform bill will be perfect,” they indulgently opined.  “Indeed, if any piece of legislation ever fulfills our full vision, our vision is far too small,” they candidly admitted.  Likely for much of the Religious Left and its allies, their holistic “vision” would entail coercive state management of every arena of human life.</p>
<p>Traditional Christians and Jews have understood that Providence has a vital vocation for families, religious institutions, private business, independent charities, and a whole range of non-government actors.  Traditionally, they have believed that the government only does, to paraphrase Lincoln, what the people cannot do for themselves.   But the old Religious Left, joined increasingly by Evangelical Left wannabes, leaves almost no civic space for the private sphere.  In their almost totalitarian perspective, the state is an endless cornucopia of goods and services providing for every human need.   Families, churches, businesses and charities become almost inconsequential, or are, at best, mere compliant hand maidens to an all powerful government.  Most religious people would find this fantasy nightmarish.  But this nightmare animates nearly all the social justice activism of religious leftists.</p>
<p>Seizing control of America’s health care industry is naturally a key ingredient of the Religious Left’s statist absolutism.  They rightly understand that Obamacare’s defeat could forever forestall socialized medicine in America.  Hence the dire urgency.  “As people of faith, we envision a society where every person is afforded health, wholeness and human dignity,” their ad sermonized, once again assuming non-governmental solutions are incapable of assuring health or dignity.  Quoting Martin Luther King, Jr, they beseeched:  “Let us not delay health care justice any longer. This is your moment for political courage, vision, leadership and faith. We urge you to take heart and move meaningful health care reform forward.”</p>
<p>There are the usual claims that without government control, chaos and suffering will ensue.  After all, how can anything be accomplished unless tax-funded bureaucrats are in charge?  The religious leftists assert that Obamacare’s demise will mean “tens of thousands will continue to die needlessly each year,” “tens of millions will remain uninsured,”  “health costs will continue to grow much faster than wages,” “many millions of hard-working people and their children will join the ranks of the uninsured,” “businesses…will either drop coverage or will be unable to make needed investments,” and the “nation’s economy – and its ability to create jobs – will suffer.”</p>
<p>How nice that the religious leftists actually mentioned “businesses” and the need for “investments.”  Maybe this was a talking point added by the coalition’s political consultants.  For the Religious Left, private businesses are the enemy, motivated only by greed and private, and to be suffered only grudgingly, and only then if under a tight government leash entailing endless regulation and high taxation.</p>
<p>Signers of this &#8220;Call for Political Courage, Vision, Leadership, and Faith&#8221; include officials of the Episcopal, Presbyterian USA, Evangelical Lutheran, United Church of Christ, and United Methodist denominations, along with Jim Wallis’ Sojourners, Evangelicals for Social Action, the National Council of Churches, Quakers, Mennonites, left-wing Catholic orders like the Maryknollers, a couple Muslim groups and several Jewish organizations.  Some of these groups, or at least their elites, have very little theology any more.  But they are increasingly unified behind a single unifying spiritual principle:  worshipping at the altar of the state.</p>
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		<title>Guess Who’s Coming to the Cathedral?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/faith-j-h-mcdonnell/guess-who%e2%80%99s-coming-to-the-cathedral/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=guess-who%25e2%2580%2599s-coming-to-the-cathedral</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 02 Mar 2010 05:01:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Faith J. H. McDonnell]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[How American Churches contribute to the surrender to Sharia. ]]></description>
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<p>If you were counting on a robust offensive (or even a mild defense) from U.S. churches to stop in its tracks the incursion of Islamism in America, perhaps you should save up to pay your <em>jizya</em> (tax imposed on non-Muslims, <em>dhimmis</em>, for the right to exist). Many churches in America are neither willing nor prepared to counter the influence and infiltration of Islamism in their own congregations, let alone in the wider civil society. Rather than fear the judgment of the Almighty, these churches fear the label “Islamophobic.”</p>
<p>Particularly in the left-leaning mainline denominations, but disturbingly more and more common with formerly conservative evangelicals as well, many churches are obsessed with making themselves likeable to Islamists. All in the name of peace and reconciliation, such churches opt for sessions of feel-good dialogue with the local mosque, gushing about how much Christianity and Islam have in common, and never challenging Muslims to serious debate on those so-called commonalities such as peace and brotherhood, the Muslim belief in the return to the earth of Jesus (<em>Isa</em>) and their devotion to Jesus’ mother, Mary (<em>Maryam</em>).</p>
<p>The Islamic interpretation of all of these is about as convoluted as the English translations in a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6D1YI-41ao"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><span style="color: #0000ff;">Monty Python Hungarian Phrasebook</span></span></a>. But most Christians don’t know that the Koran teaches that <a href="http://www.answering-islam.org/Intro/islamic_jesus.html"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><span style="color: #0000ff;">Isa was a prophet of Islam</span></span></a> (<em>Surah Âl &#8216;Imran </em>3:84) or that the Hadiths declare that <em>Isa</em> will return to earth to destroy Christianity and establish Islam. One tradition of Muhammad says that <em>Isa </em>will break the cross (abolish Christianity), kill pigs (infidels), and abolish the poll-tax (stop accepting the <em>jizya </em>and wage <em>Jihad </em>again). (<em>Sunan Abu Dawud</em>, 37:4310) Nor do they know that in the Koran, Muhammad pretty obviously confused <em>Maryam</em>, the mother of <em>Isa, </em>with the centuries’ older Miriam, the sister of Moses.</p>
<p>Eager to accept at face value expressions of peace and brotherhood, Christian/Muslim dialogues ignore these errors, as well as the many troubling statements about Christians, Jews, and other “unbelievers” in the Koran and the Hadiths. The Christian participants accept the claim of their Muslim guest speaker – usually a professor of Islamic studies at some Saudi-endowed university trained to present a perfectly palatable version of Islam to Christians – that the <em>Shari’a</em> is quite compatible with democracy.</p>
<p>Another display of eagerness to engage in fantasy was the sycophantic <a href="http://www.yale.edu/faith/acw/acw.htm"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><span style="color: #0000ff;">Loving God and Neighbor Together</span></span></a>. In this statement, Yale theologians-and-friends naively responded to <em>A Common Word Between Us and You</em>, a letter from international Muslim leaders inviting Christians to embrace Islam. The Yale response’s ‘bold’ insertion of Christianity into the conversation references Jesus’ admonition to the Pharisee to remove the log from his own eye before attempting to deal with the splinter in his neighbor’s eye (Matthew 7:5). But they cite Christ’s words in order to apologize for such Christian “logs” as the Crusades and the War on Terrorism.</p>
<p>This was a strategic blunder according to theologian and author the <a href="http://acommonword.blogspot.com/2008/02/reflections-upon-loving-god-and.html"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><span style="color: #0000ff;">Rev. Dr. Mark Durie</span></span></a>, since “it sends the signal to Muslims that whatever the problems with Islam, and whatever the sins of Muslims, they are but a ‘speck’ compared to the collective crimes of Christians.” It was also a moral failure, because it betrays Christians in the Islamic world who are being slaughtered.</p>
<p>Durie explains that the Yale response, “adopts a self-humbling, grateful tone.” This is disturbing, he says, because it fits right in with the classic Islamic understanding that Christians are <em>dhimmis </em>who should be grateful “for the generosity of having their lives spared” and humble, because their condition as <em>dhimmis</em> is contemptible. “It is regrettable that the Yale theologians have shown themselves so ready to adopt a tone of grateful self-humiliation,” Durie reproves, since <em>A Common Word</em> “did not offer awareness of, or any apology for, Muslims’ crimes, past and present, against non-Muslims.”</p>
<p>Such a scenario is sure to be played out next week when the Washington National Cathedral of the Episcopal Church hosts a “Christian-Muslim Summit,” March 1-3, 2010. There will be four main speakers and twenty other participants at this “gathering of high-ranking Christian and Muslim leaders for a candid discussion of matters affecting Christian-Muslim relations and peacemaking efforts worldwide” But if this summit is true to form and to all such past events, it will just be another exercise in <em>dhimmitude</em> for most, if not all, of the Christian participants as they fall all over themselves in their efforts to be inoffensive to Islam.</p>
<p>On a <a href="http://www.nationalcathedral.org/learn/summit2010/"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><span style="color: #0000ff;">website page</span></span></a> seemingly designed as an ‘homage’<em> </em>to Islamic/Arabic art, the participants of the summit are introduced in the typically solemn and self-important tones which the National Cathedral reserves for interfaith events. There are <a href="http://www.nationalcathedral.org/learn/summit2010/participants.shtml"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><span style="color: #0000ff;">“The Principals,”</span></span></a> including two Muslims, Ayatollah Dr. Seyyed Mostafa Mohaghegh Damad Ahmadabadi, professor of law at <a href="http://www.iranwatch.org/suspect/records/shahid-beheshti-university.html"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><span style="color: #0000ff;">Shahid Beheshti University</span></span></a> in Tehran (once known as the National University of Iran, now “Martyr University”), and Professor Dr. Ahmad Mohamed El Tayeb, president of Al-Azhar University in Cairo. This home to such interesting <em>fatwas </em>as <a href="http://formermuslimsunited.americancommunityexchange.org/apostasy-from-islam/fatwa-on-apostasy/"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><span style="color: #0000ff;">death to apostates</span></span></a> who leave Islam and <a href="http://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2009/05/18/73140.html"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><span style="color: #0000ff;">approval of adult suckling</span></span></a> was recently referred to by President Barack Obama as “a beacon of Islamic learning.”</p>
<p>His Eminence Jean-Louis Cardinal Tauran, president of the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue, and ultra-liberal John Bryson Chane, D.D., the Episcopal Church’s bishop of Washington are the Christian “Principals” in the Summit. One can only hope that <a href="http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2008/06/12/ex-diplomat-cardinal-tauran-pulls-no-punches-now/"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><span style="color: #0000ff;">Cardinal Tauran</span></span></a> might show the same courageous and forthright spirit as when he criticized the Archbishop of Canterbury for suggesting that some aspects of <em>Shari’a </em>in Britain were unavoidable and when in an interview he declared the world to be “obsessed with Islam.”</p>
<p>The other participants, referred to as “The Twenty,” include eight other Muslims along with Anglicans/Episcopalians, Catholics, and two Jewish observers. (So nice that they let another Abrahmic faith be semi-included!) All of the Muslim participants in the summit are considered “moderate.” But even a little research raises questions about the truth of their commitment to peace and religious freedom as we would define these concepts.</p>
<p>It is admirable to desire to “influence governments to promote peace and reconciliation efforts worldwide.” But this description of the summit on the National Cathedral’s website does not take seriously the differences between Christianity and Islam. It portrays them as morally equivalent.</p>
<p>“These initiatives must be taken,” the cathedral urges, “to engage leaders across faiths and nations in the search for what Jesus called “the Peace of God that passes all understanding” and what the Qur’an teaches: “O ye who believe! Enter into Peace whole-heartedly” (Surah 2:208).</p>
<p>Well, it was actually St. Paul, and not Jesus, that referenced “the peace of God that passes all understanding,” (Philippians 4: 7). Jesus offered <em>His </em>peace in John 14: 27, which he contrasted to the peace offered by the world. But one can forgive the National Cathedral for the error since they don’t quote Jesus all that much.</p>
<p>And whether or not the folks at the National Cathedral know it and made a deliberate omission, or were ignorant of the fact, when <em>Surah</em> 2: 208 speaks of “ye who believe,” the believers do not include non-Muslims. “Enter into Peace” it says. It’s that tricky “peace” as in “Religion of Peace” that really means “submission” to Islam. Ironically, the verse undermines and contradicts the whole premise of a Christian-Muslim summit.</p>
<p>The March 1-3 summit will consist of private meetings, ending with a Wednesday evening public dialogue between the participants. The dialogue, moderated by <em>Washington Post </em>associate editor David Ignatius, is only open to invited guests and to selected members of the media who possess White House, Capitol Hill, Department of State, or Department of Defense press credentials. The website assures that “anyone may participate in the forum by watching it online” and submitting a question for consideration.</p>
<p>But just as in 2006, when the cathedral <a href="http://www.nationalcathedral.org/events/mk060907.shtml"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><span style="color: #0000ff;">hosted the former president of Iran</span></span></a>, Sayyid Mohammed Khatami, the far side of the street across from the cathedral may be <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qII9nONogA"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><span style="color: #0000ff;">lined with Iranian Americans</span></span></a>, and possibly this time with Coptic Americans, Pakistani Christians, and others who have been marginalized by Islamist regimes, as well. At the 2006 event, hundreds of Iranian Americans and other advocates for freedom and democracy in Iran carried flags, banners, and posters. Some posters featured photos of young Iranian dissidents who were in prison or had been killed. Others excoriated Khatami and the Episcopal Church. The Chosen Ones, the guests invited to the public dialogue at the 2006 meeting, received an earful as angry and energetic protestors shouted, “Shame, shame Episcopal Church!” and directed both Khatami and the denomination to go to a location which many Episcopalians no longer believe exists!</p>
<p>At this coming summit, there is all the more reason for a multi-national demonstration. In addition to last summer’s slaughter of Iranian protestors and dissidents, American Copts are mourning <a href="../2010/02/16/egypt%e2%80%99s-christians-in-peril/"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><span style="color: #0000ff;">the recent murders of Egyptian Christians</span></span></a>. Christians in Pakistan continue to suffer injustice and violent, murderous attacks. And most Sudanese are extremely angry with Egypt because of its attempts to force a postponement of this year’s national election in Sudan, its complicity in Khartoum’s Arab Islamist racist agenda, and its brutal treatment of Sudanese refugees trying to flee to Israel.</p>
<p>Dhimmitude stops at the doors of the Washington National Cathedral. The doors that are painted bright red to remind worshippers not only of Christ’s sacrifice, but of the blood of the martyrs who have gone before them. The sidewalk demonstration will be a summit for those who have experienced that other side of Christian-Muslim relations, the martyrdom side. It will be a far sight more candid than what goes on inside the cathedral.</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><em>Faith J. H. McDonnell directs </em><a href="http://www.theird.org/Page.aspx?pid=183&amp;srcid=-2"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><span style="color: #0000ff;">The Institute on Religion and Democracy’s</span></span></a><em> Religious Liberty Program and Church Alliance for a New Sudan, and is the author of Girl Soldier: A Story of Hope for Northern Uganda’s Children (Chosen Books, 2007).</em></p>
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		<title>A New Era of Responsibility?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/vasko-kohlmayer/a-new-era-of-responsibility/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-new-era-of-responsibility</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 09 Feb 2010 05:00:54 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vasko Kohlmayer]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=49343</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[President's proposed 2011 budget is a fiscal sham.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/obamaj.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-49453" title="obamaj" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/obamaj-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="225" /></a></p>
<p>“We will continue to go through the budget, line by line, page by page, to eliminate programs that we can&#8217;t afford and don&#8217;t work,” declared President Obama in his State of the Union address on January 27.</p>
<p>Five days later the president delivered his Fiscal 2011 budget to the US Congress. This he did to much fanfare, seeking to cast it as a product of fiscal prudence. In the <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/assets/budget/03_Presidents_Message.pdf">message</a> that accompanied the document, he stated:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;The Budget includes more than 120 programs for termination, reduction, or other savings for a total of approximately $23 billion in 2011, as well as an aggressive effort to reduce the tens of billions of dollars in improper Government payments made each year.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>At first sight this may look like the work of an earnest waste cutter. It is, however, nothing of the sort. The $23 billion of “savings” is actually only about one half of one percent of the $3.84 trillion total.</p>
<p>A question for the president: Is one half of one percent all the waste you can find in the federal government? After all, it is an institution whose financial profligacy is legendary. Should we assume, Mr. President, that all of the remaining 99.5 percent is spent wisely and un-wastefully?</p>
<p>It goes without saying that most of the meagre $23 billion will never be cut. Those involved with the agencies and programs slatted for reductions will make sure of that. Claiming that their work is indispensable for the well-being of the nation, they will make a hysterical run on Capitol Hill where their cause will receive much sympathy. When all is said and done most of their budgets will not only be restored, but many will walk away with increases.</p>
<p>But here is the larger point. By calling the proposed $23 billion of cuts “savings,” the administration makes it sound as if the government&#8217;s expenditures would go down by this amount vis-à-vis last year&#8217;s levels.  This, however, is not the case. The proposed $3.84 trillion budget represents a three percent plus increase over the 2010 total. So even as ordinary Americans are forced to cut back on their consumption, the federal government&#8217;s voracious appetite for spending continues to grow unabated. Needless to say, we can ill afford it. As a consequence, the government will post a deficit of $1.25 trillion, which will represent more than 8 percent of the nation&#8217;s GDP. These abysmal figures, however, have done nothing to detract from the president&#8217;s sense of humor. He chose to unveil his budget under the motto “a new era of responsibility.”</p>
<p>But all this is still apparently not enough for some of the president&#8217;s friends on Capitol Hill. Shortly after he introduced his 2011 budget proposal, Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.), the House majority whip, <a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/79039-clyburn-weve-got-to-spend-our-way-out-of-this-recession">opined</a> that looking for any more savings would only make things worse. “We&#8217;re not going to save our way out of this recession. We&#8217;ve got to spend our way out of this recession,” he said.</p>
<p>The insanity of this should be obvious to all. It is simply impossible to spend our way out of trouble when we are so deeply in debt already. Spending more will only make things worse. Having incurred astronomical debts, we are still able to borrow at low rates because of the dollar&#8217;s status as the world&#8217;s reserve currency. But this situation will sooner or later come to an end. In another sign that the day of fiscal reckoning is approach fast, Moody&#8217;s Investor Services <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a82cfe04-10f5-11df-9a9e-00144feab49a.html">warned</a> that at some point it may be forced to lower America&#8217;s triple A credit rating. The reason for this? The unrestrained spending of the federal government. Steven Hess, senior credit officer at Moody’s, told the <em>Financial Times</em> that the budget outlook submitted by the Obama administration last week “did not stabilise debt levels in relation to gross domestic product.” It would be interesting to hear the spend-happy James Clyburn comment on that one.</p>
<p>Needless to say, losing the triple A rating would have a devastating effect on this nation&#8217;s finances as it would make servicing the national debt far more expensive. The only way to avert this outcome is by slashing spending and cutting deficits. Unfortunately, those in charge lack the political will to do so. Instead of offering real solutions, the president tries to posture as a fiscal hawk while proposing laughable savings of one half of one percent. As if this was not bad enough, the third most powerful Democrat in the House of Representatives thinks that cutting further would be outright harmful.</p>
<p>Even as Obama and Clyburn were talking up the proposed budget, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer worked quietly behind the scenes to line up votes to raise the <a href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hEkfx_bpGC-zVoeKNR38gWLcjXdw">debt ceiling</a> by another $1.9 trillion. The effort to pass the record hike was triggered by the Treasury&#8217;s warning that the national debt is on the track to hit $14.3 by the end of this month. If the Treasury&#8217;s estimate is correct, the national debt will have grown by more than one third in less than thirteen months of Obama&#8217;s term. This expansion of national indebtedness is as astounding as it is unprecedented. But if this should frighten you there is no need to worry, because we have just entered “a new era of responsibility.”</p>
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		<title>Byron York: Who are the 300 terrorists held in U.S. prisons? &#8211; Washington Examiner</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/byron-york-who-are-the-300-terrorists-held-in-u-s-prisons-washington-examiner/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=byron-york-who-are-the-300-terrorists-held-in-u-s-prisons-washington-examiner</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 08 Feb 2010 03:44:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=49246</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[&#8220;The Bush administration used the criminal justice system to convict more than 300 individuals on terrorism-related charges,&#8221; writes Attorney General Eric Holder in a new letter to Republican critics in Congress. The letter is part of the Obama administration&#38;apos;s aggressive defense of its decision to grant full American constitutional rights to al Qaeda soldier Umar [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>&#8220;The Bush administration used the criminal justice system to convict more than 300 individuals on terrorism-related charges,&#8221; writes Attorney General Eric Holder in a new letter to Republican critics in Congress. The letter is part of the Obama administration&amp;apos;s aggressive defense of its decision to grant full American constitutional rights to al Qaeda soldier Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the accused Christmas Day bomber. That defense boils down to one sentence: Bush did it, too.Republicans on Capitol Hill object. They argue that one of the reasons some terrorists were handled in the criminal justice system is that it took George W. Bush and Congress years to establish a military tribunal system that satisfied constitutional requirements &#8212; a process that was lengthened by legal challenges filed by some of the same lawyers who now work in Holder&amp;apos;s Justice Department.You can argue about that forever. But there&amp;apos;s one serious factual debate going on about Holder&amp;apos;s letter, and that concerns those &#8220;300 individuals.&#8221; Just who are they?It turns out some lawmakers have been trying for months to get an answer. They&amp;apos;re not saying the claim is false &#8212; they just want to see what it&amp;apos;s based on. But so far they haven&amp;apos;t been able to find out.It started back in May 2009, when President Obama gave his famous National Archives speech outlining the plan to close the Guantanamo Bay terrorist detention center. &#8220;Bear in mind the following fact,&#8221; Obama said. &#8220;Nobody has ever escaped from one of our federal &amp;apos;supermax&amp;apos; prisons, which hold hundreds of convicted terrorists.&#8221; Although the president did not put a number on it, various figures, ranging up to 300, have been tossed around in the months since.</p>
<p>via <a href="http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/Who-are-the-300-terrorists-held-in-U_S_-prisons_-83588677.html">Who are the 300 terrorists held in U.S. prisons? | Washington Examiner</a>.</p>
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		<title>Kicking the Palestinian Habit</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/davidhornik/kicking-the-palestinian-habit/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=kicking-the-palestinian-habit</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 02 Feb 2010 05:06:54 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[P. David Hornik]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=48280</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Middle East “peace process” is on hold – and that’s a good thing. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-48281" title="obama_abbas_netanyahu" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/obama_abbas_netanyahu.jpg" alt="obama_abbas_netanyahu" width="400" height="290" /></p>
<p>Conspicuous for its absence in President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address last week was any mention of what is variously called the Arab-Israeli conflict or the Middle East peace process. Israeli analyst Yoram Ettinger <a href="http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3841505,00.html">suggests</a> that this “reflects a US order of priorities and, possibly, a concern that mediation in the Arab-Israeli conflict does not advance—but undermines—Obama’s domestic standing.”</p>
<p>Conceivably, a similar premise underlies Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Israel/Article.aspx?id=167225">demonstrative acts</a> in favor of settlement in the West Bank. Last week, just after a meeting in Jerusalem with U.S. Middle East envoy George Mitchell, Netanyahu marked the tree-planting holiday of Tu Bishvat by planting trees in public ceremonies in the Jerusalem-area West Bank settlements of Kfar Etzion and Maale Adumim. He capped it off on Friday with a tree-planting ceremony in Ariel, a settlement somewhat deeper in the West Bank in Samaria. There Netanyahu suggested that the settlement was a crucial part of Israel:</p>
<blockquote><p>“Everyone who understands the geography of Israel know how important Ariel is. It is the heart of our country. We are here where are forefathers were, and we will stay here.”</p></blockquote>
<p>And on Sunday Benny Begin, son of the former prime minister and a member of Netanyahu’s inner security cabinet, <a href="http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3842105,00.html">took part</a> in a cornerstone-laying ceremony in yet another West Bank settlement, Beit Hagai, and said:</p>
<blockquote><p>“The state of Israel and the people of Israel have interests in Judea and Samaria [West Bank] and in Jerusalem, which are not only security-related, but based on an ancient affiliation.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Considering that in November Obama <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2009/11/20/obama-to-israelis-jerusalem-is-a-%E2%80%9Csettlement%E2%80%9D-by-p-david-hornik/">harshly criticized</a> Israel for planning to build within a neighborhood of Jerusalem, also conspicuous for its absence, so far, is any public U.S. rebuke of Netanyahu or Begin for these gestures. Ettinger suggests that Obama’s “involvement with the Arab-Israeli conflict has diverted his attention from issues which are much more important…eroded [his] support among the American people, [and] complicated his relations with friends of Israel on Capitol Hill, whose support is critical to Obama’s legislative agenda.”</p>
<p>Although it may be too early to assume a waning of Obama’s pressures on Israel, his words in his recent <em><a href="http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1955072-6,00.html">Time interview</a></em> also strengthen that impression. “This is as intractable a problem as you get,” Obama said. “Both sides—the Israelis and the Palestinians—have found that the political environment [was] such that it was very hard for them to start engaging in a meaningful conversation.” If so, a lull in the grimly relentless diplomatic activity on the Israeli-Palestinian front would be a chance to rethink some assumptions that have become all too axiomatic.</p>
<p>One is that the Palestinian side should always be coddled, with infinite patience, and should never have to pay a price for its failures. With Netanyahu having declared in November an unprecedented ten-month freeze in new construction in the West Bank, and Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas continuing to refuse to hold talks with him, it can be hoped that Netanyahu’s and Begin’s affirmations signal a new Israeli assertiveness. It is only for the Palestinians that land, and offers, are kept indefinitely on hold even as they <a href="http://www.palwatch.org/">preach hatred</a> and practice rejectionism. Energetically resuming settlement activity at the end of the ten months would, for once, be a fitting response.</p>
<p>It could also be asked whether the pursuit of a Palestinian state as a supposed panacea has ever made much sense in normative terms. Human Rights Watch has published its <em>World Report 2010</em> and gives a <a href="http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2010/01/25/world-report-2010-harsher-climate-human-rights?print">rundown</a> of the human rights situation in Middle Eastern Arab countries that is anything but encouraging. Regarding women’s rights, the report points out that:</p>
<blockquote><p>“Perpetrators of so-called honor killings in Jordan (where there were at least 20 such killings), and in Syria (at least 12), benefit from legal provisions that mitigate their punishments…. Domestic abuse went largely unpunished in Saudi Arabia and Yemen. In Lebanon and Jordan, where domestic abuse can be tried as assault, protection mechanisms for women are largely inadequate and ineffective.”</p></blockquote>
<p>As for prison conditions, “Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Yemen failed to tackle frequent incidents of torture. Jordan’s prison reform program has not strengthened accountability mechanisms for torture….”</p>
<p>Minority rights—“Saudi Arabia discriminated against its Shia population…. Kurds, Syria’s largest non-Arab ethnic minority, were subject to systematic discrimination….” and so on.</p>
<p>Considering that all these abuses—oppression of women, torture in prisons, persecution of the Christian minority—already exist in the Palestinian Authority (not to mention Hamas-ruled Gaza), a diplomatic lull could be a time, particularly from an American standpoint, to question whether the dogged pursuit of a Palestinian state holds up to scrutiny. Instilling democracy in the Arab world may not have been realistic; <em>creating</em> another dictatorship—apart from the security threat it would pose to Israel—would appear worse than pointless.</p>
<p>Instead, a combination of Israeli assertiveness and U.S. benign neglect would convey the right messages to the Palestinians: that they, too, are subject to the cost-benefit calculi of human life and there are costs for clinging to radical positions rooted in a vision of Israel’s demise; that their present situation of enhanced autonomy under Israeli security control is quite feasible for Israel, which has always had its own interests and attachments in the West Bank.</p>
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		<title>Praying for Socialized Medicine</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/mark-d-tooley/praying-for-socialized-medicine/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=praying-for-socialized-medicine</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 22 Jan 2010 05:07:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark D. Tooley]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=47246</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[As Obamacare implodes, the religious Left has a meltdown.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-47250" title="tooley" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/tooley.jpg" alt="tooley" width="450" height="300" /></p>
<p>The apparent political implosion of Obamacare after Scott Brown’s Massachusetts win is already enraging the Religious Left.  To have been so close to fulfilling a decades long crusade only to face defeat can be infuriating.  When government controlled health care is seen as portending the advent of God’s Kingdom, then the fury is even greater.</p>
<p>Writing for Jim Wallis’ Sojourners, activist Valerie Dixon impatiently urged “congressional courage” to defy public opposition to Obamacare.  It’s a typical Religious Left theme:  Help the people even when they don’t want it!</p>
<p>“Now is not the time to read more into election results than we ought,” Dixon anxiously cautioned.  “And even if the election were a referendum on health-care reform, so what?  This is a representative democracy. It is a republic because we expect our leaders to lead.”  How wonderful that the Religious Left is now interested in political and constitutional theory.  More frequently, they demand virtual rule from the streets.</p>
<p>But Dixon explained that we should expect Congress, when overriding the people’s opposition to government-controlled health care,  to summon the “moral vision to lead us forward and to have an enthusiasm and a commitment to that vision which is so strong that we will see the vision too.”  In other words, maybe Americans will awake to the beauty of Obamacare if Congress will presciently force it upon an unwilling public.  After all, “We need our elected officials to demonstrate the virtues necessary to do what is right for the American people.”</p>
<p>Evidently Dixon, like the rest of the Religious Left, does not believe that Obamacare proponents are obligated actually to persuade Americans of the merits of their “vision.”  Just pass it, at whatever cost, and hope that public opinion will supinely surrender when they have no option left.  “We need them to demonstrate the virtues of responsibility, commitment, complexity, and love,” Dixon serenely opined about Congress, which is so well known for these noble traits.  “Now is the time for courage.”</p>
<p>Contrary to Dixon’s insistence that a republic is supposed to be about leaders stubbornly defying the public will, America’s divided form of government is supposed to inhibit radical agendas that lack consensus support.  Famously, if apocryphally, America’s founders supposedly framed the Senate especially to be a “cooling” saucer that resists the heated “vision” of zealots, with or without majority support, who want to impose what many Americans ardently oppose.  “ The country needs the moral clarity that universal health-care legislation will bring,” Dixon insisted.  But if such a vision arouses such widespread resistance, its proponents, at least in American democracy, are obliged to argue more persuasively before the nation must kneel before it. Evidently, the Religious Left realizes its arguments have failed, but it still demands the coercive powers that Obamacare would grant.</p>
<p>Similarly, another Sojourners columnist bewailed the collapse of public support for Obamacare.  “The insurance, pharmaceutical, medical, and financial industries are simply delighted that a majority of Americans are now unwilling to do what it takes in order to have a fair, compassionate, and reasonably priced health-care system,” fretted LaVonne Neff.  “We like the health care we currently have, even though our insurance premiums and copayments increase every year as our coverage decreases and our claims are denied. We don’t want to change our system in any way. Except, of course, to make it better. And cheaper. Without actually changing anything.”  She snarkily concluded:  “We believe in magic.”</p>
<p>The real “magic,” of course was the proposal that government directed health care could, through centralization and force, provide better and more expansive health care at reduced cost and increased efficiency.  Neff cited the usual and now discredited claims that other Western countries have better health statistics because of government health care.  Americans do have greater health problems because of behaviors not as common to Europe’s homogenous and more static societies. But America remains virtually the best place to actually receive care once sick.</p>
<p>Immune to factual data, history and human nature, government-controlled health care has long been and remains the object of the Religious Left’s frenzied faith.  What tent-revivals once were for evangelicals, Obamacare rallies have been for the Religious Left.    Last month, United Methodist, Presbyterian, and United Church of Christ lobbyists joined with Vermont socialist Senator Bernie Sanders and Moveon.org at a Capitol Hill Obamacare candle light vigil and rally.   United Methodist Board of Church and Society chief Jim Winkler unthinkingly defended the Senate’s version of Obamacare’s abortion coverage, which would become one cause of its demise.  “American families should have the opportunity to choose health coverage that reflects their own values and medical needs,” he implored.  “A principle that should not be sacrificed in service of any political agenda.”</p>
<p>Surreally, Winkler further cluelessly pleaded that Congress “should stand up for the people who could be most helped by health-care reform” by “enacting meaningful legislation now that includes a strong public option.”  A little later, Winkler convened a press conference with Michigan Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow and, perhaps sensing the impending collapse, became a little histrionic:  “Authentic health-care reform has been delayed by insurance companies seeking to protect vast profits and grotesquely inflated executive salaries.”  He further angrily alleged:  “Demagogues have frightened many U.S. citizens — including the so-called “teabaggers” who are demonstrating on Capitol Hill today — into believing their health care is at risk.”</p>
<p>Even last month, Winkler was complaining at his press conference:  “One disappointment has followed another,” while warning recalcitrant Congressmen that “they risk facing the same prophetic judgments once visited upon the rulers of Israel,” and insisting:  “Now is the time for moral courage in the face of money and power.”  In other words, Winkler realized most Americans opposed Obamacare but desperately demanded that Congress approve it any way.  After all, it’s the Lord’s will, or so the Religious Left insists.</p>
<p>Winkler shrilly complained that pro-life “faith leaders of various stripes have placed their ideological and financial agendas ahead of the needs of the American people” by opposing Obamacare.  Unselfconsciously, he actually was describing the Religious Left’s own zealous and apparently failed imposition of health care statism on an unwilling nation.</p>
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		<title>Peter Suderman: How the CBO became the biggest impediment to ObamaCare, Reason Magazine</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/jlaksin/peter-suderman-how-the-cbo-became-the-biggest-impediment-to-obamacare-reason-magazine/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=peter-suderman-how-the-cbo-became-the-biggest-impediment-to-obamacare-reason-magazine</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 09 Dec 2009 18:36:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=41223</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[It was January 2009, and Democrats were triumphant. Their party had won major victories in both the House and the Senate, and Barack Obama, arguably the most economically left-wing president in decades, had just won the White House on a promise to finally achieve what had eluded liberals for so long: universal health care. As [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>It was January 2009, and Democrats were triumphant. Their party had won major victories in both the House and the Senate, and Barack Obama, arguably the most economically left-wing president in decades, had just won the White House on a promise to finally achieve what had eluded liberals for so long: universal health care.</p>
<p>As the new era unfolded in Washington, plans for overhauling one-sixth of the economy began to take shape. Health care reforms, Democrats vowed, would extend insurance to every American and be fully paid for without requiring middle-class tax hikes, all while cutting costs significantly enough to save the country from financial catastrophe. To sell these claims the party trotted out one of the most respected number-crunchers in town, Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag, a former Brookings Institution health care expert obsessed with cost cutting. With 60 votes in the Senate, nothing seemed to stand in the Democrats’ way.</p>
<p>Nothing, that is, except the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), a nonpartisan federal agency that until this year was run by none other than Peter Orszag. As drafts of various health care bills began to emerge on Capitol Hill, the CBO, responsible for devising Congress’ official legislative cost estimates (known as “scores”), released a series of reports that demolished key Democratic claims. According to the CBO, both the “tri-committee” bill proposed in the House and the bill proposed in the Senate Finance Committee would cost in excess of $1 trillion over 10 years, might leave tens of millions uninsured, and would not curb rising health care costs. Indeed, both would add substantially to the budget deficit in the long term. As the year progressed, the CBO proved a more effective check against key elements of the Democrats’ domestic agenda than anything concocted by Republican strategists or libertarian wonks. In an October article, The Washington Post concluded that the CBO had “essentially condemned two legislative proposals by slapping them with trillion-dollar price tags.”</p>
<p>Created as an afterthought and initially intended as a low-profile congressional calculation service, the CBO has quietly risen to a place of unique prominence and power in Washington policy debates. Widely cited and almost universally respected, it is treated as judge and referee, resolving disputes about what policies will cost and how they will work.</p>
<p>But the agency’s authority is belied by the highly speculative nature of its work, which requires an endless succession of unverifiable assumptions. These assumptions are frequently treated as definitive, as if on faith. In practice, this means the CBO is not merely an impartial legislative scorekeeper but a keeper of the nation’s budgetary myths, a clan of spreadsheet-wielding priests whose declarations become Washington’s holy writ.</p>
<p>via <a href="http://reason.com/archives/2009/12/08/the-gatekeeper">The Gatekeeper &#8211; Reason Magazine</a>.</p>
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		<title>Stimulus 3.0? &#8211; by Jacob Laksin</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/jlaksin/stimulus-3-0-by-jacob-laksin/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=stimulus-3-0-by-jacob-laksin</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 09 Dec 2009 05:50:52 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[President Obama promises to spend the country out of recession – again. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-41154" title="539w" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/539w.jpg" alt="539w" width="377" height="264" /></p>
<p>Almost a year into his first term and ten months after a Democratic Congress passed his administration’s economic rescue package, a budget-busting $<em>787</em> billion “stimulus,” President Obama has come up with a curious explanation for the sorry state of the economy. Apparently, it’s all the Republicans’ fault.</p>
<p>That was the takeaway from the president’s <a href="http://www.c-span.org/pdf/wh120809_obama.pdf">economic address</a> yesterday at the Brookings Institution, in which Obama sought to account for the country’s swelling deficit and persistent double-digit unemployment by blaming them on the party that is out of power. Pausing to lament what he called the “bitterness of partisanship,” the president provided a textbook example of the wedge politics he had in mind by assailing the GOP for creating the economic crisis. Obama complained that “[w]e were forced to take those steps [to jump-start the economy] largely without the help of an opposition party which, unfortunately, after having presided over the decision-making that had led to the crisis, decided to hand it over to others to solve.” No bitter partisanship there.</p>
<p>It’s not clear, however, that the administration has “solved” the problem that Republicans supposedly created. The administration’s stimulus package has done little to lower the jobless rate in the country, which now stands at 10 percent – this despite the rosy predictions of Obama’s top economic advisors that unemployment would <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/06/14/biden-says-guessed-wrong-unemployment-numbers/">not exceed 8 percent</a> if a stimulus were passed. In November, hyped by the administration as a more hopeful month on unemployment, some 11,000 jobs were lost. Against this bleak background, the administration’s repeated claim that the stimulus has “created and saved” over one million jobs – itself a <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703932904574509341078005538.html">highly dubious metric</a>, as<strong> </strong>Edward Lazear, the former chairman of the President&#8217;s Council of Economic Advisers, has documented – is bound to come as cold comfort.</p>
<p>Then there is the deficit. The president has long maintained that he inherited massive deficits from the Bush administration. The charge is not entirely without merit. Whether it was the Medicare prescription drug benefit, federal education spending or the early financial industry bailouts, the Bush administration certainly contributed to the $1.3 trillion deficit that greeted Obama in office. Clouding the exculpatory narrative is that the Obama administration has since <a href="http://blog.heritage.org/2009/03/24/bush-deficit-vs-obama-deficit-in-pictures/">increased the massive spending of the Bush years</a>. It’s no coincidence that the federal budget deficit has soared to record-high <a href="http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/s_648477.html">$1.42 trillion</a> for 2009 – the largest deficit in American history, relative to the size of the economy, since World War II. Even that does not factor in the cost of the administration’s health care overhaul, whose estimated ten-year price tag could top <a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6908296.ece">$1 trillion</a>.  </p>
<p>But if the administration realizes that it has a spending problem, it has an odd way of curbing its excesses. In response to criticism of the growing federal deficit, the administration has simply promised to spend more, with the president yesterday highlighting his plan to “spend our way out of this recession” with a new round of stimulus spending. Yet the new stimulus – a term the president tellingly avoided using this week – is unlikely to be more successful than previous incarnations. Whatever the merits of the administration’s plans to boost spending on everything from infrastructure projects like bridges and highways, to social spending on seniors and veterans, and public sector jobs, it’s hard to see how they will energize the private sector that, in his own telling, the president deems crucial to reviving the economy.</p>
<p>The more pressing question is how the administration will pay for a new round of stimulus spending that could cost $170 billion or more. For instance, the administration’s proposal to use leftover funds from the much-maligned bank bailouts – the $700 billion <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Program">Troubled Asset Relief Program</a> (TARP) – has already incited ire on Capitol Hill. Republicans spent yesterday pointing out that the funds from the TARP were originally intended to go toward reducing the national debt. Channeling the funds to pay for a scarcely disguised new stimulus program, they charge, would be illegal. At a minimum, appropriating taxpayer funds aimed for a narrow economic purpose to subsidize the administration’s spending priorities is bound to prove controversial with the public.</p>
<p>That’s something the administration can ill afford. Obama’s newest stimulus plan comes at a time when public confidence in his stewardship has fallen to an all-time low. According to the latest<em> </em>Gallup poll, <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/12/08/obamas-percent-approval-lowest-president-point/">Obama&#8217;s approval rating has fallen to 47 percent</a>, the lowest for any president at this point in his first term. Revisiting the same strategy that has failed to revive the economy to date will hardly allay those concerns. “Our work is far from done,” the president announced yesterday. A growing number of Americans fear exactly that.</p>
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