Quote Of The Week:

Quote Of The Week:

“Frankly, I don’t know
what it is about California , but we seem to have a
strange urge to elect really obnoxious women to high office. I’m not bragging, you understand, but no other state, including Maine , even comes close. When it comes to sending left-wing dingbats to Washington ,
we’re number one. There’s no getting around the fact that the last time anyone saw the likes of Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, and Nancy Pelosi, they were stirring a cauldron when the curtain went up on ‘Macbeth’. The three of them are like jackasses who happen to
possess the gift of blab. You don’t know if you should condemn them for their stupidity or simply marvel at their ability to form words.”

–columnist Burt Prelutsky , LA Times

How a “Nice American Girl” Became a Jihadist: Dr. Siddiqui Found Guilty

She studied at MIT and at Brandeis where she received a Ph.D in Neuroscience. Thus, she was both an educated and in some sense, a westernized woman. Both her Pakistani-born father and Pakistani husband are physicians who trained in the West, in England and America, respectively; her brother and sister are also highly trained professionals. Nevertheless, Dr. Aafia Siddiqui learned to hate America, hate Jews, and hate Israel right here in liberal America.

Aafia Siddiqui 

Like a small but increasing number of “westernized” Muslim women, Aafia Siddiqui joined her local mosque (in her case, the Roxbury, MA, mosque) and started to veil, and as she did, her ambitions became aggressively jihadic. This is not a contradiction. Obediently veiled Muslim women can be very aggressive, murderously so. They certainly police other women in savage and self-righteous ways in Iran and Indonesia. In Iraq, veiled Muslim women have blown up other Muslim female religious pilgrims. And, Muslim women who were normatively spurned by their mothers were manipulated by Samira Jassim, an attentive, “loving” Iraqi mother-figure, who carefully turned them into suicide killers.

Samira Jassim 

Women are very aggressive—but usually towards other women. I have written about this in Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman. Traditionally, women do not go up against men whom they view as their potential protectors and as more powerful than they are. Ironically, Islamic jihad wishes to reverse, upend, both Nature and human evolutionary history. Just as normatively degraded mothers are “turned” into hero-mothers who publicly praise their suicide killer sons—just so, are normatively self-hating women “turned” into Al-Qaeda heroines who not only directly attack men, but who directly attack infidel male soldiers.

Although Al-Qaeda officially wants its women to breed and bear future male jihadists and to keep the homes and secrets of Al-Qaeda warriors, they have now publicly called for women suicide killers. The West has been threatened with a horde of veiled suicide killers, both male and female.

Today, the Islamic Veil is not a religious symbol—read Marnia Lazreg on this. The Veil is a politically manipulated symbol of jihad. The French understand this and are trying to ban or limit the Islamic Veil, which they view as a security risk as well as a human rights violation. The Americans had better start this conversation now, not later.

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Blinded by Hate

Blinded by Hate

Posted By P. David Hornik On February 10, 2010 @ 12:05 am In FrontPage | 27 Comments

^[1]

For anyone wishing to understand the lack of progress in the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process,” as well as the persistence of extremist and anti-Semitic views in that part of the world, the latest Pew Research Center report on attitudes in the Arab and Muslim world makes for must-reading. (A summary ^[2] of the report can be found here and the full report here ^[3].)

The report is based on a survey that the Pew Center’s Global Attitudes Project conducted from May 18 to June 16 last year. It begins by saying that “across predominantly Muslim nations, there is little enthusiasm for the extremist Islamic organizations Hamas and Hezbollah, although there are pockets of support for both groups, especially in the Middle East.” What the Pew Center calls “little enthusiasm,” however, is in most cases quite considerable enthusiasm.

True, in Turkey Hamas gets only a 5% “favorable” rating and Hezbollah only 3%. But the next-lowest ratings are in Lebanon, where 30% approve of Hamas and 35% of Hezbollah—substantial proportions considering that both are terrorist organizations. And regarding Hezbollah, Lebanese Shiites and Sunnis are, not surprisingly, sharply split, with 97% of Shiites seeing the Shiite terror group favorably and only 2% of Sunnis.

As for the Palestinians, when it comes to the most extreme organizations and leaders, only in the case of Hamas—paradoxically—do they trail behind some other nationalities. Some 44% of Palestinians view Hamas favorably; the group does better both in Jordan (56%) and Egypt (52%). That this has something to do with Palestinians’ direct experience of Hamas, the rulers of Gaza, is suggested by the fact that Hamas actually came in less popular in Gaza (37%) than in the West Bank (47%).

When it comes to Hezbollah, though, the overwhelmingly Sunni Palestinians are ahead of the pack with a 61% approval rating for this Shiite outfit; the next highest are in Jordan (51%) and Egypt (43%). It is no secret that Hezbollah has many admirers, cutting across Sunni-Shiite divides, for its perceived military successes against Israel; that its cachet is particularly strong for the Palestinians, though, is consistent with other findings of the survey.

The survey not only gauged attitudes toward organizations but also toward various leaders, including six Arab and Muslim leaders among whom the most extreme were Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Osama bin Laden. Nasrallah – who has said that “If Jews all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide” – scored highest among the Palestinians with 65% expressing confidence in him; next came the Jordanians (a majority of whom, it should be noted, are also Palestinians) at 56%, with Nasrallah’s own Lebanese compatriots a fairly distant third at 37%.

As for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president who has said Israel “must be wiped off the map,” he, too, did best among the Palestinians at 45%, edging out Indonesia at 43%, with the next highest scores in Arab countries being Jordan and Lebanon both at 32%.

And as for Osama bin Laden himself, here the Palestinians were almost his greatest fans at 51%, far ahead of the next group—again the Jordanians—at 28%; only among Nigerian Muslims (excluding Nigerian Christians) did the Al Qaeda leader do a bit better at 54%.

The survey also gauged Muslims’ attitude toward religious groups, including Jews. Here, at least, the Palestinians can’t be accused of being ahead of the rest. Ninety-five percent of Egyptians, 97% of Jordanians, 98% of Lebanese, and 97% of Palestinians registered an unfavorable view of Jews; among non-Arab Muslims—Turkey 73%, Indonesia 74%, Pakistan 78%—the rates were only somewhat lower.

Although the findings on Palestinian attitudes and general Arab anti-Semitism are not much different from previous Pew Center surveys, perhaps it is time to take more note of them—especially as hands are being wrung about the hiatus in the “peace process” with the Palestinians. In that connection Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, is quoted ^[4] as saying that “Since there are no prospects of talks on the horizon, and in many ways what their efforts wrought was a wasted year without any negotiations, I believe the [U.S.] administration deserves an ‘F’ for failure to deliver on results.”

It is odd that Foxman, head of an organization devoted to fighting anti-Jewish and other forms of bigotry, apparently sees “peace with the Palestinians” as such a feasible goal. But there is no need to single Foxman out, as his fallacy is widespread.

It is true that Israel has a limited but valuable peace with Egypt and Jordan, no less monolithically anti-Semitic than the Palestinians. That the Palestinians, however, show such high enthusiasm for the likes of Hezbollah, Nasrallah, Ahmadinejad, and Bin Laden gives a better clue as to why “peace” keeps running aground than all the anguished analyses of supposedly failed diplomacy.

Obama’s Balloon Hits the Dirt

February 10th, 2010

by Brent Bozell, Townhall.com

 Obama just keeps sinking lower and lower

It was only a year ago that liberal elites in Washington were shoveling dirt on conservatism. James Carville was writing boastful books about 40 years of Democrat dominance, boasting in his typical way that he could call “time of death” on the Republican Party. Liberals believed their hype that Barack Obama would be that black FDR they pictured on the cover of Time magazine.

Now newspaper headlines read otherwise: “Where did the hope for Obama go?” The hot-air balloon has crashed to Earth, and you can tell conservatism is back with a swagger. You can tell because the media’s daily output has gone from breathless valentines for Obama to angry denunciations of Tea Party protesters.

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews was apoplectic about this conservative uprising. “What’s going on out there in the Republican Party is kind of a frightening, almost Cambodia re-education camp going” where “if you’re not far-right, you’re not right enough.” It didn’t seem to matter to Matthews that millions of people were executed in those communist Cambodian “re-education camps.” His desire to demonize far outstripped any desire to treat conservatism with respect.

Read More:

Obama-Iran the cartoon

February 11th, 2010

Porkulus II: Return of the Phony Jobs Boondoggle

Lead Story

Porkulus II: Return of the Phony Jobs Boondoggle

By Michelle Malkin  •  February 10, 2010 08:57 AM

My column today looks at the phantom Porkulus II/Jobs Bill. I say “phantom” because there is no bill text I can actually point you to — it’s the same business-as-usual we’ve been subjected to since Porkulus I. GOP Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was on the Senate floor yesterday pleading to see the legislation: ““My members need to be able to feel like they understand what they are being called upon to support.” God save us from bipartisanship. (And yes, Obama-defined bipartisanship = surrender.)

Update: The Hill has a leaked draft version of the bill titled the “”Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment Act” here. But: “After a meeting between President Barack Obama and the bipartisan congressional leadership of the House and Senate, Reid and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) made clear that the jobs bill remains a work in progress so the document does not represent the final package.” Remember back in the good old days when the Senate would deliberate and committees would work on legislation out in the open? Yeah, getting hard to remember those days…

Jamie Dupree asks: “Is this a jobs bill or a Legislative Christmas Tree?”

Philip Klein looks at the “doc fix” money stuffed in the bill.

Update: ABC News reports that nearly 80 percent of the wind power money in Stimulus I went to…”foreign manufacturers of wind turbines.” That is: China.

Related: Rea Hederman at the Heritage Foundation takes a closer look at the anti-job tax gimmicks on the table.

Related: Marco Rubio reminders Florida voters that it’s the one year anniversary of the Crist-Obama stimulus hug.

***

Porkulus II: Return of the Phony Jobs Boondoggle
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2010

Immutable law of Beltway political physics: The only real jobs that a government stimulus stimulates are government jobs. A year after President Obama signed his first trillion-dollar economic stimulus package into law, the federal workforce is at all-time high. The nation’s unemployment rate has swelled to 9.7 percent, but Washington’s economy is thriving.

More than 2.1 million government workers will be on the federal payroll by the end of 2010. The lobbying industry is booming. USA Today reports that 14 federal agencies have hired 3,000 workers to oversee stimulus spending and spent nearly $190 million so far on salaries and overhead.

Just one-third of the stimulus money has been spent so far, but the White House is now hectoring the Senate to ram through yet another phony jobs boondoggle in the name of bipartisanship. As GOP Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas reminded Americans during the Republicans’ weekly radio address Obama and the Democrats promised a year ago that the jobless rate would remain below 8 percent with their stimulus legislation. “Americans are still asking, ‘Where are the jobs? Where are the jobs?’ But all they are getting from Washington is more spending, more taxes, more debt and more bailouts.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Tuesday that the Porkulus II plan – reportedly with an $85 billion price tag — was a “really nice piece of legislation.” But you’ll have to take his credibility-damaged word for it.

Despite anticipated votes on the bill before President’s Weekend, no one outside the Democrat leadership and K Street had seen an actual bill as of Tuesday afternoon. Few will read the whole thing before casting their hasty votes. And once again, we’ll only be informed of the last-minute sweeteners, Cash for Cloture handouts, and backroom deals after the ink of the president’s signature is dry.

Reportedly, public-sector unions are pushing hard to include their precious card-check plan, which would allow Big Labor bosses to sabotage workers’ rights to a federally supervised, private ballot election.

Reportedly, Democrats plan to stuff a reauthorization of the Patriot Act into the bill to make it harder for Republicans to oppose it.

Reportedly, Stimulus, Jr. will also include a $20 billion bailout for the beleaguered federal Highway Trust Fund, which has been raided for years to pay for bike paths, beautification programs, and other pet projects while its core targets — basic roads and bridges — have deteriorated.

Reportedly, the Democrats will throw in some small-business tax breaks and a temporary payroll tax holiday gimmick, supported by some Republicans, for companies that hire unemployed workers.

What we do know for sure: The $154 billion Spawn of Spendulus passed in the House on a party-line vote in December is crammed to the gills with special interest-spending. Half of the money would go to government bureaucracies s already overflowing with Stimulus One money. Nearly $30 billion would go to protect public-sector union employees in state governments. While tax relief would be temporary (Democrats always make sure of that), the Reid bill will follow the House version in continuing the endlessly “temporary” extension of jobless benefits that will cost billions of dollars and encourage more and longer unemployment. That’s on top of the $58 billion in jobless benefit extension funds paid out by Porkulus I. Senate Republicans voted against this permanent entitlement lard-up measure that has nothing to do with job creation two years ago. They should do so again. In addition, President Obama wants $23 billion added for a fraud-friendly “Cash for Caulkers” weatherization program. Instead of returning the money to reduce the debt as stipulated in the law, President Obama is also pushing to siphon $33 billion from the ever-morphing TARP bank bailout program to fund small business lending initiatives.

“What I won’t consider is doing nothing in the face of a lot of hardship across the country,” President Obama said this week. “Doing nothing?” How about leaving well enough alone, dispensing with the rest of the original stimulus, retreating from debt-deepening, tax-increasing, economy-stifling initiatives from the government health care takeover to cap-and-trade, and refusing to redistribute tax dollars toward private job destruction and government job inflation?

Comedy gold: Obama claims he’s a ‘fierce advocate’ of free market

Rick Moran

Let’s play a game. We’ll call it “Counter-Intuitive.” Take any historical personage and make them a “fierce advocate” for whatever is exactly the opposite of what they’re known for.

Examples: Genghis Khan: A fierce advocate of mercy shown to one’s enemies.

Adolf Hitler: A fierce advocate of Zionism.

Martin Luther King: A fierce advocate of violent revolution.

Bill Clinton: A fierce advocate of chastity.

Or how about this one: Barack Obama – fierce advocate of the free market:

President Obama insisted that he and his administration have pursued a “fundamentally business-friendly” agenda and are “fierce advocates” for the free market, rejecting corporate criticism of his policies.”The irony is that on the left we are perceived as being in the pockets of big business, and then on the business side we are perceived as being anti-business,” Obama said in an interview this week with Bloomberg BusinessWeek. “You would be hard pressed to identify a piece of legislation that we have proposed out there that, net, is not good for businesses,” he added. He predicted that legislation he will sign this year would cut corporate taxes by about $70 billion.

In an effort to make U.S. products more attractive, Obama set a year-end goal for persuading China to allow the value of its currency to rise. He said his administration is “going to have some very serious negotiations” with China that are “going to be bumpy.”

During the interview, Obama was asked about the $17 million bonus awarded to J.P. Morgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon or the $9 million award issued to Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein.

The president said that while $17 million is “an extraordinary amount of money” for Main Street, “there are some baseball players who are making more than that and don’t get to the World Series either, so I’m shocked by that, as well.”

The left, of course, is having apoplexy over the bonus business. But the curious thing is that the president is equating his cozying up to huge banks with advocating a “free market.” The law professor believes that J.P. Morgan, Citigroup, and other “too big to fail” entities actually want a free market. That’s the absolute last thing those quaisi-government entities want to see. They much prefer their special relationship with Washington who will bail them out when they get too greedy and blow things up. They, and many other large corporations, are the antithesis of the free market, and yet Obama can’t tell the difference between businesses that compete in a real marketplace and businesses that want government to tilt the marketplace in their favor.

To make these statements of Obama’s even more laughable, Dan Riehl points out why the president might not “begrudge” those two bank execs their huge bonuses:

Well, Dimon has given over $100k just to the DSCC. Plus individual candidate donations, most of which go to Democrats.

And Blankfein gives almost all of his donations to Democrats – $136k to $4k.

Why should Obama care, his party is getting its cut?

It is depressing, this man’s ignorance of the basic forces of freedom that are at the core of American society. Never having worked in the private sector, or forced to meet a payroll, the cynicism and titanic arrogance it takes to believe that he can make a statement in support of the free market and think that the American people will simply ignore everything his government has tried to do to destroy it over the last year is ridiculous.

If this is his idea of “pivoting” toward the middle, he just fell flat on his face.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/02/comedy_gold_obama_claims_hes_a.html at February 11, 2010 – 07:47:26 AM CST

Our National No-Energy Policy

By Claude Sandroff

Economically sensible states including Texas, Louisiana, and Pennsylvania are developing their enormous, non-traditional, “tight” natural gas reserves. In the process, they are transforming America’s energy profile for the next half-century in the face of a federal government indifferent at best to this energy revolution.

In Texas, drillers have become so adept at safely extracting natural gas from shale that wells are often located in suburban subdivisions. In Louisiana, formerly impoverished residents of northwestern counties are now millionaires thanks to exploration leases and production royalties. And in western Pennsylvania, old steel towns have been reinvigorated by natural gas, as well as by the shops and restaurants that follow industrial development. In these places, a high school graduate can complete an extensive ninety-day course in wellhead techniques and earn $50K per year upon graduation.

And then there are states like New York, which, though heavily in debt and losing productive residents by the thousands every year, continues to drive away the nation’s best drillers. When New York denied Chesapeake Energy the right to drill in the Catskills because of exaggerated fears about watershed pollution, Chesapeake’s CEO Aubrey McClendon remarked: “Why go through the brain damage of that when we have so many other opportunities?” 

So McClendon can avoid a stroke and simply hop across the border to Pennsylvania. There, backed with $ 2.25 billion from his newest partner, French supermajor Total, he can exploit the same shale deposit but with more cooperative and supportive Americans.

Unfortunately, at the federal level, our government more closely resembles New York than Pennsylvania or Texas. Ken Salazar’s Department of the Interior, Steven Chu’s Department of Energy, and Barack Obama’s White House are formulating policies not aimed at extracting every barrel of oil (or equivalent) in our country, but instead policies that seem to cry out, “No Energy Development Wanted!”  

Thomas Pyle, the president of the Institute for Energy Research, recently offered a chilling description of our national energy focus. “When it comes to paving the way for the responsible development of homegrown, job-creating energy resources, no administration in history has done more to ensure producers do less.”

Pyle had Salazar and his army of “lease police” in his crosshairs when he made this brutally honest assessment. Considered one of the most hostile Interior secretary in recent history, Salazar’s energy strategy copies much from the foreign policy of his boss: Blame Bush. Instead of establishing clear and ambitious development goals to guide our explorers and drillers, he delivers invective. 

The previous administration’s approach to oil and gas leasing … by and large was that leasing should happen almost anywhere, at whatever cost. … We don’t believe we have to be drilling everywhere and anywhere.

In Salazar, Hugo Chávez and the Persian Gulf heads of state could not have a better lobbyist and advocate.

Steven Chu is almost a comic figure, and if the present administration were not so rich in easy targets, he might be the subject of Saturday Night Live sketches. Thankfully, Chu has retreated from claims like “coal is my worst nightmare” and from programs to paint every roof in America white. But his department seems to be nothing but a font of energy clichés in support of wind, solar, clean energy, geothermal, and reductions in carbon emissions while reducing research efforts in deepwater exploration and canceling the expansion of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Chu’s department offers us not sound analysis and an understanding of the tough choices ahead as we trod on a path towards energy independence, but empty, dead-end, green-inspired slogans.

It might seem impossible, but Obama is even cleaner and greener still, and he typically offers nothing but empty platitudes about supporting clean coal, offshore drilling, and nuclear power. He explained to the Republicans during his post-SOTU outreach that nothing was more important for the country than primacy in green technologies: “And the future is that clean energy — cleaner forms of energy are going to be increasingly important.”

Though rarely admitted, nothing could be farther from the truth. The world’s fastest-growing and most dynamic countries are among the least green: China, India, and Brazil. In contrast, those countries that have plunged headlong into green utopianism have nothing to show for it but high employment and crushing debt. 

Spain decided that the future was green, and its heavily subsidized solar and wind escapades have led to at least 19% unemployment. Its economists have estimated that the nation lost more than two jobs in the private sector for every subsidized job it created in the green sector.

Though the physics and engineering undergirding energy technologies are complicated, our energy choices would be quite stark and simple if politicians were honest enough to study and communicate them. Clean, green, renewable energy technologies are expensive, inefficient, and uncompetitive, and they will not lead us into a sustainable carbon-free paradise.

For example, there was great excitement recently when the Department of Energy claimed that 20% of the eastern U.S. could be powered by wind by 2024. But fourteen years from now, our electrical consumption will grow by more than 20%, so that we will use the same amount of coal, nuclear, and natural gas in this imaginary future grid that we use today.

Hydrocarbons will never go away. We should feel blessed to have them in such vast quantities here in America. We will always need them. But if political leaders do not stiffen their spines to that reality and devise policies to encourage exploration, development, and delivery of traditional resources, then our futures can be nothing but poor, dark, and cold.

Claude can be reached at csandroff@gmail.com.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/02/our_national_noenergy_policy.html at February 11, 2010 – 07:45:34 AM CST