Spy on America!

All Things Contemptible

noreply@blogger.com (Norman C Hoffmann) — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 15:37:00 +0000

What NPR�"s �Seducated and intelligent⬝ elite really thinks

James O’Keefe, who is now felling executives of National Public Radio as he previously trap-doored ACORN, must be a deeply cynical young man. How else could he have imagined that ACORN workers in several cities would cheerfully offer to help him set up brothels using underage Central American girls?

How else could he have imagined that executives of National Public Radio (and apparently PBS, though that video has not surfaced as of this writing) would eagerly truckle to a front-group of the Muslim Brotherhood? But they did. They all did. As Nora Ephron said, “No matter how cynical I get I just can’t keep up.”

#ad# Like the FBI’s Abscam sting in the 1970s that netted six congressmen, a senator, and assorted others willing to accept bribes from “Arab sheiks,” O’Keefe and his colleagues designed a sting operation that involved activists posing as “Amir Malik” (supposedly from Nigeria though his accent screamed Caribbean), and “Ibrahim Kasaam.” They were, they explained, representatives of MEAC, the “Muslim Education Action Center,” a trust that was considering a $5 million donation to NPR.

On the fake website created for the scam, MEAC described its mission as fighting “intolerance” but also “to spread acceptance of sharia around the world.” You or I might have been given pause by that second bit, but not Ron Schiller, president of the NPR Foundation, and Betsy Liley, “senior director for institutional giving” at NPR. They showed up for lunch. Even before the risotto was served, “Ibrahim” volunteered that his organization was founded by members of the Muslim Brotherhood, “in America actually.” Not an eyelash quivered from the NPR team.

“Ibrahim” expressed his discontent with “the current discourse” in America, particularly as it concerned Muslims. This elicited enthusiastic nodding from Schiller and Liley. Schiller rhapsodized about NPR being the “voice of reason” -- nearly the only place Americans could turn for “fair and balanced” news. He used that stolen slogan repeatedly. Schiller and Liley stressed that anti-Muslim bigotry was just the latest iteration of a classic American sin. “We put the Japanese in camps,” Liley lamented.

As for those who thought perhaps NPR should do without taxpayer dollars, Schiller noted, “It feels to me as if there is a real anti-intellectual move on the part of a significant part of the Republican party.” And then, inexplicably, this: “The current Republican party, particularly the Tea Party, is fanatically involved in people’s personal lives. They’re very fundamental Christian, and I wouldn’t even call it Christian, it’s this weird evangelical kind of move . . .”

Really? All those thousands of Americans carrying signs and listening to speeches about debt and taxes and spending and bankruptcy -- they were fundamentalists?

“The Republican party has been hijacked by this group,” Schiller explained to people he thought were representing a Muslim Brotherhood–linked group. They weren’t just “Islamophobic, but xenophobic -- they believe in right-wing, middle-America, gun-toting . . . I mean it’s scary. They’re seriously racist, racist people.”

Again and again in the course of two hours (full video is available at theprojectveritas.org), Schiller described NPR’s listeners as “educated and intelligent,” unlike you-know-who. It’s of course ridiculous to say that NPR is “liberal” -- but, just among ourselves -- “liberals are more educated, fair, and balanced.” There’s that phrase again!

#page#

What Schiller dislikes about America is that “people like to make snap judgments . . . that all gays are after your children, that blacks are going to stab you . . . NPR is constantly trying to break through that.” But it’s hard, because such “a small percentage of the population” is educated and intelligent.

Told that NPR is affectionately referred to as National Palestinian Radio among his compatriots, Schiller and Liley laughed, and Liley exclaimed “Really? I love that!” Schiller suggested that NPR was neither “pro-Israel nor anti-Israel” but didn’t hesitate to boast to his “Muslim” hosts that NPR’s Israel coverage had offended a prominent Jewish American family so much that they withdrew their funding. Ah, exclaimed “Ibrahim,” this underscores the degree to which the American press is controlled by Jews and Zionists. Most of the press, “Ibrahim” continued, is accordingly pro-Zionist.

#ad# “I don’t find that at NPR,” Schiller offered. “Obviously” you find it among people “who own newspapers,” he continued. “But nobody owns NPR, so I don’t find it.”

Thank goodness Mr. Schiller is among the “educated and intelligent” elite -- those who would never dream of stigmatizing minorities, dealing in stereotypes, or sanctioning bigotry. Thank goodness he would never consider slandering his countrymen in order to curry favor with people he had every reason to suspect were Islamic extremists.

Thank O’Keefe that Schiller and his boss are out of their jobs. It’s a start.

Mona Charen

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Dems�" Dull Budget Scissors

noreply@blogger.com (Norman C Hoffmann) — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 14:53:00 +0000

Nancy Pelosi demands more while President Obama refuses to lead.

According to earthly logic, if you got a raise of 10 percent last year, but this year you got a raise of only 8 percent, you still got a raise. On Planet Washington, that qualifies as an indefensible slashing.

So when the GOP actually cut $4 billion from the budget last week, the Democrats acted as if it was an involuntary amputation.

#ad#Now the GOP wants to cut $61 billion of discretionary non-defense spending from the total budget of $3.7 trillion, and Democrats are responding as if this will spell the end of Western civilization.

But given their terror of forcing a government shutdown in this tea-soaked climate, Democrats were forced to counteroffer with a cut of $10.5 billion, or 0.28 percent of the federal budget. Imagine you have a budget of $10,000 (about 40 percent of it borrowed on a credit card), then “slash” 28 bucks. That’s what it’s like to be a frugal Democrat.

Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace repeatedly pressed Sen. Dick Durbin: Is $10.5 billion in cuts “really the best the Democrats can do?” The No. 2 Senate Democrat responded, eventually: “We’ve pushed this to the limit.” Any cuts beyond that would simply crater our economy and gut “investments” to make us competitive with China. Apparently, Durbin thinks trimming the staff at the Oregon National Laboratory will result in us all becoming busboys at a Beijing restaurant.

Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, makes Durbin look stingier than the guy who invented copper wire by refusing to let go of a penny. Her solution to the deficit is -- wait for it -- to spend a whole bunch more. In October, Pelosi said that every dollar spent on unemployment benefits and food stamps puts another $1.79 into economy. “It is the biggest bang for the buck when you do food stamps and unemployment insurance.”

If that were true, why not drop bags of cash from C-130s over the unemployed and poor?

Her latest version of teenage-mutant-ninja Keynesianism is to “invest” even more on education. “Nothing brings more to the treasury than investing in education,” Pelosi said.

Never mind that Washington has “invested” roughly $2 trillion in education since 1965. And forget the fact that spending on education at all levels of government has gone from $55,000 (in 2010 dollars) for one student’s K–12 student in 1970 to $155,000 in 2009, according to Cato Institute scholar Andrew Coulson, while “overall achievement has stagnated or declined, depending on the subject.”

Would another trillion in education spending really have a greater return than, say, allowing American companies to drill for the billions of gallons of oil under our soil and the trillions of cubic feet of natural gas? Don’t ask Pelosi. Like Bluto in Animal House talking about the Germans bombing Pearl Harbor, she’s on a roll.

Why am I talking about Durbin and Pelosi? Well, Obama is in a fetal crouch under the Oval Office desk, muttering something about the need for courage and bipartisanship while quietly proposing $6.5 billion in cuts, which the Congressional Budget Office said is really only $4.7 billion. (That’s about $700 million more than the U.S. spends in borrowed money every day. Imagine someone in obscene debt going a little more than 24 hours without using his credit card. Problem solved!)

Oh, and Senate majority leader Harry Reid seems determined to keep talking until the men in the white coats escort him off the Senate floor. He was last heard saying the GOP has gone crazy because it had cut funding to a cowboy-poetry festival in Nevada. No, really. Stop laughing.

#page#In 2007, the budget was 19.6 percent of the GDP. In 2009, it went up to 25 percent of GDP. That’s where the Democrats would like it to stay.

What happened? The financial crisis, of course. But as many of us suggested at the time, one of the Democrats’ real motives behind the stimulus was to inflate the “baseline” budget so that huge increases would never be reversed thanks to the D.C. logic that a cut in growth is a cut.

#ad#Now, Democrats greet any attempt to restore the size of government to its pre-crisis size -- when we were still living way above our means -- as if America would be plunged into the Stone Age.

Look at it this way. Those heartless Republican bastards would cut 2011 non-defense discretionary spending from 3.6 percent to 3.2 percent of GDP. Under Bill Clinton, such spending averaged 3.1 percent of GDP.

We owe $14 trillion we don’t have. Our total liabilities -- i.e., Social Security and other entitlements -- dwarf that. Obviously, we can’t just cut discretionary spending alone. But if it’s this hard to ask rough-rider poets to cowboy up, how are we going to deal with what everyone agrees is the much harder stuff?

Jonah Goldberg

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Rep. Keith Ellison�"s Bigotry

noreply@blogger.com (Norman C Hoffmann) — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 14:44:00 +0000

The congressman told a teachable story this morning. One problem: It�"s untrue.

This morning, Rep. Keith Ellison (Democratic-Farmer-Labor party, Minn.) appropriated a hearing on Islamic radicalism by weeping his way through a speech about whata-buncha-nasty-bigots Americans are. He chose as his case in point Mohammed Salman Hamdani, a Pakistani-born Muslim American who rushed to lower Manhattan on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, to assist in rescue efforts, and died in the collapse of the World Trade Center. Here’s how Representative Ellison tells the story of the aftermath of his death:

After the tragedy some people tried to smear his character solely because of his Islamic faith. Some people spread false rumors and speculated that he was in league with the attackers only because he was Muslim. It was only when his remains were identified that these lies were fully exposed. Mohammed Salman Hamdani was a fellow American who gave his life for other Americans. His life should not be defined as a member of an ethnic group or a member of a religion, but as an American who gave everything for his fellow citizens.

Does Ellison’s account check out with reality?

#ad#No. It is actually pretty close to the opposite of the truth. In fact, six weeks after the September 11 attacks -- before Hamdani’s remains were identified, which Ellison implies to be the turning point of public perception -- Congress signed the PATRIOT Act into law with this line included: “Many Arab Americans and Muslim Americans have acted heroically during the attacks on the United States, including Mohammed Salman Hamdani, a 23-year-old New Yorker of Pakistani descent, who is believed to have gone to the World Trade Center to offer rescue assistance and is now missing.” That is, Hamdani was actually singled out for particular high honors among the thousands of victims of the September 11 attacks.

There’s little evidence of the “rumors” of which Ellison speaks, either. Poke around yourself. Go to Google and search for Mohammed Salman Hamdani’s name, using various time frames from before today’s hearings (say, in the week after the September 11 attack). You’ll discover two discordant sets of returns: none for sites and news reports accusing Hamdani of being a terrorist, and many thousands of pages honoring him as a hero while claiming that he was “widely accused” of being a terrorist.

Web pages that do source the claim that Hamndani was “widely accused” of being a terrorist typically trace back to a single report from the New York Post, dated Oct. 12, 2001, and titled “Missing -- or Hiding? Mystery of NYPD Cadet from Pakistan.” The piece has been taken offline, but its content is preserved elsewhere. Here’s what the New York Post wrote:

His family distributed missing-person fliers in the fear that the 23-year- old, who is trained as an emergency medical technician, went instead to the World Trade Center to help and was killed.
But investigators for the FBI and NYPD have since questioned the family about which Internet chat rooms he visited and if he was political.
Hamdani, a graduate of Queens College with a biochemistry degree, had been in the NYPD cadet program for three years. He became “inactive” because he needed to work full time, his mother said.
Police sources said he hadn’t been to work at the NYPD since April, but he still carried official identification.
One source told the Post: “That tells me they’re not looking for this guy at the bottom of the rubble. The thing that bothers me is, if he is up to some tricks, he can walk past anybody [using the ID card].”
Hamdani’s mother, who has been in the United States for two decades, denied her son was political or a religious fundamentalist. Cops at the Midtown Tunnel reported spotting someone who looked like Hamdani yesterday morning.

#page#So the Post reported 1) that Hamdani’s family believed he died in the WTC attacks, 2) that the FBI asked Hamdani’s mother a few background questions after a mistaken sighting, and 3) that an unnamed source felt such questioning implied guilt. No doubt, that was hard on the grieving mother. But frankly, this -- a mistaken sighting, and very preliminary investigations of many people, most of whom turn out to be innocent -- is the kind of thing that inevitably happens after a major terrorist attack.

After that questioning, the FBI didn’t go farther in a serious investigation, and, a week later, Hamdani was singled out for honors by the United States’ executive and legislative branches with those lines in the PATRIOT Act that immortalized his story.

#ad#Then, he was eulogized by the New York Times, had scholarship funds named after him, was honored by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly (both of whom went barefoot to honor Muslim practice) at his funeral, and has been celebrated over and over again by the media.

The belief that Mohammed Salman Hamdani was a victim of anti-Muslim bigotry was never based in reality. It was manufactured by the Left as a rhetorical prop, exploited as a bludgeon against people who want to talk seriously about terrorism. If Hamdani was singled out for his faith, it would appear he was singled out for especially high honors. Most 9/11 victims were not half so celebrated as he was. Rather than suffering from apocryphal American anti-Muslim bigotry, Salman Hamdani appears to have benefited from America’s eager inclusiveness.

Americans have long seen Mohammed Salman Hamdani as a hero. Too bad Representative Ellison saw him only as a prop.

--- Matthew Shaffer is a William F. Buckley Fellow at the National Review Institute.

Matthew Shaffer

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The Right to Choose

noreply@blogger.com (Norman C Hoffmann) — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 14:34:00 +0000

It�"s time for the National Right to Work Act.

Even as they scream for “workers’ rights,” the one right that union bosses despise is the right to work. Big Labor and its overwhelmingly Democratic allies oppose a woman’s right to choose whether to join a union. Instead, they prefer that predominantly male employers and labor leaders make that choice for her.

The American Left has hoisted “choice” onto a pedestal taller than the Washington Monument. Liberals and their Big Labor buddies will race to their battle stations to defend a woman’s right to choose to abort her unborn child. Meanwhile, they holler themselves hoarse to prevent her (and her male counterparts) from freely choosing to accept or avoid union membership.

#ad#Sen. Jim DeMint (R., S.C.) understands that exercising this choice is a basic human right, and neither private employment nor government work should require joining or paying dues to a union.

“Many Americans already are struggling just to put food on the table,” DeMint said, “and they shouldn’t have to fear losing their jobs or face discrimination if they don’t want to join a union.” Thus, on Tuesday, DeMint introduced S. 504, the National Right to Work Act (NRTWA). If not today, then soon, a federally protected individual right to work should be signed into law.

The NRTWA’s economic rationale is compelling:

� Among America’s 22 right-to-work states (including Florida, Georgia, and Texas), non-farm private-sector employment grew 3.7 percent from 1999 to 2009, while it shrank 2.8 percent among America’s 28 forced-unionism states (e.g. California, Illinois, and New York).

� During those ten years, real personal income rose 28.3 percent in right-to-work states and sank 14.7 percent in forced-unionism states.

� In 2009, cost-of-living-adjusted, per-capita, disposable personal income was $35,543 in right-to-work states versus $33,389 in forced-unionism states. Americans in right-to-work states enjoyed more freedom -- and a $2,154 premium.

Notwithstanding that right-to-work states are comparatively prosperous engines of job growth, the case for right-to-work laws is not merely economic, but moral.

“Government has granted union officials the unprecedented power to force individual employees to pay up or be fired and to coerce workers into subsidizing union speech,” says the National Right to Work Committee’s Patrick Semmens. “This fundamental violation of individual liberty -- an infringement on freedom of speech and freedom of association -- finally would end with passage of the NRTWA.”

“Compulsory unionism#...#should not be lawful under a free government or tolerated by a free people,” Donald R. Richberg argued in his book Compulsory Unionism: The New Slavery. As a labor attorney and federal official, Richberg helped draft landmark union laws, including the 1926 Railway Labor Act, the 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act, and the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act. Later in his career, however, Richberg considered such legislation authoritarian.

Richberg added: “A voluntary organization of workers united for self-help is inherently a much stronger organization than a union composed, to a considerable extent, of unwilling members.”

#page#Indeed, labor leaders should not fear voluntary membership. If their talents for securing higher wages, richer pensions, and cozier working conditions are truly as impressive as advertised, Americans should line up to sign up. If, however, unions must dragoon workers into their ranks, why should government allow or even mandate such bondage?

Last October, pollster Frank Luntz surveyed 760 private- and public-sector unionized employees. Eighty percent agreed that union membership and dues should be optional. (Error margin: +/− 3.7 percent.) Hence, the NRTWA is good policy and good politics -- if only Republicans and free-marketeers would promote it.

#ad#Today’s union bosses may dismiss the NRTWA as a right-wing plot. But they should recognize that it reflects the philosophy of a pioneer union boss.

None other than Samuel Gompers, founder of the American Federation of Labor, once wisely said: “I want to urge devotion to the fundamentals of human liberty -- the principles of voluntarism. No lasting gain has ever come from compulsion. If we seek to force, we but tear apart that which, united, is invincible.”

--- New York commentator Deroy Murdock is a nationally syndicated columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.

Deroy Murdock

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Wisconsin: Playing the Recall Card

noreply@blogger.com (Norman C Hoffmann) — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 14:20:00 +0000

Which side has its finger on the public�"s pulse?

Because of their vote on Wednesday night to limit collective bargaining for some public workers, eight GOP Wisconsin state senators may face recall elections in the coming weeks.

“The national unions and the Democrats nationally have really decided that they’re going to try to make Wisconsin an example for other states,” says Mark Jefferson, chairman of the Wisconsin Republican party. Their message is, he says, “If you intended to pursue these reforms, we will intimidate you as best we can, and there will be retribution.”

#ad#To recall a state senator in Wisconsin, a group needs to file a petition, and then collect signatures from eligible voters in the senator’s district. The number of signatures required is 25 percent of the number of votes cast in that district in the last gubernatorial election. Wisconsin law also requires that a politician have been in office a year before any recall election can occur, which is why not all 18 GOP senators are facing recalls.

On Tuesday, the Wisconsin Democratic party reported that it had about 15 percent of the signatures it needed. On Thursday, Democratic spokesman Graeme Zielinski reported that updated numbers were not available, but that the number of signatures “absolutely has increased.”

“We raised $250,000 in the last twelve hours alone [i.e., the hours immediately after the vote] to support these recall efforts,” he adds, “because people are spitting mad. People are itching for some way to talk back to Scott Walker. The recall is now the most immediate way that they can help.”

Jefferson acknowledges that the recall efforts against Republicans “are clearly very real.” “The Democrats have raised a couple million dollars already, when you put together what the state Democratic party has raised and the Democratic senate campaign committee,” he says. “And the outside groups, they’ve turned their stunt into a campaign cash cow. They’ve got the resources to pump out there.”

“We’re definitely taking it seriously,” agrees Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald.

After filing a recall petition, organizers have 60 days to collect signatures. If they gather enough signatures, state law requires a period of at least 31 days for reviewing and validating those signatures. If the result is that there are enough legitimate signatures, an election is scheduled for six weeks later.

Republicans have mounted recall efforts of their own against the eight Democratic senators eligible for recall. Jefferson says there’s “a lot of enthusiasm on the ground right now” for the recalls of Democrats, but he has not yet released any numbers on how many signatures have been gathered.

Republican state senator Randy Hopper, who is being targeted for a recall, says that recall threats had been used earlier to “to try to bully members of my caucus into voting a different way.” He adds that the prospect of a recall election is “really the last thing on my mind.”

“My colleagues and I have received substantial death threats today,” Hopper says. “So thinking about politics right now really isn’t something that is a priority to me.”

He also sees significant differences between the Democratic and Republican recall efforts. “My colleagues and I are being targeted for standing up and doing our job,” he says. “We’re being targeted because people don’t like the decisions we’ve made or the votes that we’ve cast. I think that’s very different from the recalls going on against a group of people who refuse to do their jobs, who refuse to be here working on behalf of their constituents.”

For the Democrats, the magic number is three: If they succeed in recalling three Republicans, the senate will flip to Democratic control. And they are not concerned about losing any seats themselves through recall elections. Talking about the Republican recall efforts, Zielinski says, “They have no momentum.”

Gov. Scott Walker will not be eligible for a recall effort until next year. But Zielinski says the Democratic party will definitely target him then.

Jefferson calls the possibility of a Walker recall “not likely at all.”

“I think people are going to, over time, appreciate the reforms that will have been implemented,” he says.

Jefferson is also confident that if recall elections occur, the Republican senators “will survive.”

“I think we’ll withstand it, but only if we are able to mobilize our people and counter what the Democrats are doing,” Jefferson explains. “We’re never going to match them dollar for dollar. We know that. But we do have a lot of taxpayers out there who have been waiting for these types of reforms to take place. And we think they’re going to stand strong on election day.”

— Katrina Trinko is an NRO staff reporter.

Katrina Trinko

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The New Paul Revere

noreply@blogger.com (Norman C Hoffmann) — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 14:10:00 +0000

Rep. Peter King is alerting us to the Islamic radicals already among us.

As House Homeland Security Committee chairman Peter King (R., N.Y.) opened this morning’s hearings on domestic Muslim radicalism, his ears must have stung from the nasty names he had been called.

“McCarthyite,” some charged. The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson believed King was fueling “irrational fears.” Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada worried that King would “demonize law-abiding American Muslims.”

#ad#Georgetown University Islamic-studies professor John Esposito called King’s hearing “a platform for Islamophobia draped in the American flag, reinforcing ignorance, stereotypes, bigotry, and intolerance in the name of national security.”

If King deserves such vitriol, so do key Obama administration officials who share King’s grave concerns about homegrown Islamic extremists and their threat to national security.

• “It is one of the things that keeps me up at night,” Attorney General Eric Holder told ABC News’s Pierre Thomas last December. “The threat has changed from simply worrying about foreigners coming here, to worrying about people in the United States, American citizens -- raised here, born here, and who for whatever reason, have decided that they are going to become radicalized and take up arms against the nation in which they were born.”

• “The terrorist threat to the homeland is, in many ways, at its most heightened state since 9/11,” homeland-security secretary Janet Napolitano told King’s committee on February 9. “We are now operating under the assumption, based on the latest intelligence and recent arrests, that individuals prepared to carry out terrorist attacks and acts of violence might be in the United States.”

Napolitano added that a January report “from the New York State Intelligence Center, the fusion center for the State of New York, examining 32 major terrorism cases in the United States related to al-Qaeda-like ideology since 9/11, shows that 50 of the 88 individuals involved in those plots were U.S. citizens at the time of their arrests, and among those citizens, a clear majority were natural-born.”

• “Al-Qaeda and its adherents have increasingly turned to another troubling tactic: attempting to recruit and radicalize people to terrorism here in the United States,” deputy national security adviser Denis McDonough told Virginia’s Adams Center on Sunday. “How do we know this? Well, al-Qaeda tells us. They’re not subtle. They make videos, create Internet forums, even publish online magazines, all for the expressed purpose of trying to convince Muslim Americans to reject their country and attack their fellow Americans.”

• McDonough cited former Californian Adam Gadahn, now a self-described al-Qaeda spokesman. American-born Anwar al-Awlaki now ruthlessly directs al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, presumably from deep inside Yemen. McDonough also mentioned Omar Hammami, an Alabamian who joined the Somali terror group al-Shabaab and, McDonough says, “uses rap and hip hop in an attempt to reach young Americans.”

“I am taking the next logical step,” Representative King told me. “I am listening to the administration and acting on the information that they are giving us. Janet Napolitano came before my committee, and she testified about this threat. Eric Holder went on TV and talked about it. Denis McDonough spoke with me at home about his speech, and he encouraged me to go ahead with the hearing. He said, ‘We welcome the hearing and congressional involvement.’ If Eric Holder is staying up at night thinking about this, I think I should hold hearings, so that he can get a good night’s sleep.”

#page#Beyond these prominent Democrats, some Muslims also have denounced their militant co-religionists:

• “American Muslims must take the lead in creating solutions to the radicalization of our own,” Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, M.D., wrote Wednesday on FoxNews.com. “These hearings will provide the long overdue platform for us to step away from the standard denials and apologetics in order to reclaim our Muslim identity from the terrorists and redefine ourselves within the framework of the American pantheon.” Jasser, a former U.S. Navy lieutenant commander and now president of the Phoenix-based American Islamic Forum for Democracy, testified today before Congressman King.

#ad#Anyone who considers all of this an anti-Muslim hallucination need only remember Army major Nidal Hasan’s alleged murder of 13 soldiers and injury of 31 others at Fort Hood (reportedly while yelling “Allahu akbar!”). Faisal Shahzad pleaded guilty last June 21 to attempting to detonate a car bomb outside The Lion King in Times Square. Last October 18, Islamic prison convert Abdul Rahman was convicted of conspiring to blow up a Bronx synagogue. These are just a few of the Muslim-extremist American citizens who necessitated Congressman King’s hearings.

Rather than excoriate him as the reincarnation of George Wallace, Americans should applaud Peter King as a latter-day Paul Revere. He warns loudly that not only are the radical Muslims coming -- they already are here.

--- New York commentator Deroy Murdock is a nationally syndicated columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.

Deroy Murdock

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A Very Modest Victory in Madison

noreply@blogger.com (Norman C Hoffmann) — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 13:56:00 +0000

The political theater under way in Madison invites both Democrats and Republicans to imagine that something more significant has transpired there than is in fact the case: By curtailing the collective-bargaining powers of some government-employee unions, Wisconsin merely joins the ranks of Colorado and Maryland -- not precisely hotbeds of right-wing extremism. In liberal Maryland, which extends collective-bargaining rights to some, but not all, government workers, this must all seem particularly overblown: The state is home to a great many employees of the federal government, many of whom belong to public-sector unions that do not enjoy the extortionate powers until now invested in Wisconsin’s union bosses.

Gov. Scott Walker and the sober Republicans in Wisconsin’s state legislature are celebrating a victory, to be sure, but it is in truth a modest one: Under the new law, government workers will vote annually on whether they wish to be represented by a union, and the state will not be compelled to extract union dues from employees’ paychecks on behalf of the unions. Health-care and pension benefits for government workers will be set by the people’s elected representatives outside of the union-dominated collective-bargaining process, and wage increases will be indexed to inflation. Government workers still will enjoy salary-and-benefit packages that in most cases exceed what those workers could hope to command in the private sector, along with such hard-to-price benefits as enhanced job security.

#ad#For this modest reform, Governor Walker has been compared to Adolf Hitler, and progressives have called for his assassination. For adopting collective-bargaining rules similar to those found in many other states and more generous than those found in some, the people of Wisconsin have seen their state capitol under the occupation of bongo-beating misfits while the necessary and essential business of state government ground to a halt, with Democrats fleeing the state in a cynical bid to prevent duly elected legislators from legislating.

Many of our states, and a great many of our municipalities, suffer from precarious finances. Wisconsin, for all of its shortcomings, has seen its fiscal affairs managed with relative prudence, and Governor Walker’s “budget repair” bill is an example of that: dealing with the state’s problems before the point of crisis has been reached, while the state still has adequate resources and options for enacting necessary reforms in an orderly and intelligent fashion. The bill has been called “extreme” and “draconian,” but is in fact the opposite of that: No state worker is set to lose his job, there will be no furloughs or salary cuts. The worst that government employees will endure is a requirement that they pay 12.6 percent of their own health-insurance premiums and 5.6 percent of their own pension contributions. And they all will receive something of value: a regularly scheduled vote about whether to be represented by their unions, which often serve no one’s interests but those of the union bosses themselves.

And that is the real source of the rage on the left: Mandatory union representation, empowered by mandatory collective bargaining and mandatory dues deductions enforced by the state, creates an enormous flow of cash for Democratic political candidates and their pet causes. From 1989 to the present, five of the ten biggest donors to American political campaigns have been labor unions, including public-sector unions such as the National Education Association and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. The overwhelming majority of those donations go to Democrats. The union bosses and their Democratic patrons know that giving workers more of a choice about union representation will diminish that power and reduce that cash flow. That is what this is about, for all of the cheap talk about “civil rights” -- as though federal employees in Washington were being treated like second-class citizens because their unions do not enjoy the same princely powers until now wielded by Wisconsin’s.

This is not the end of Wisconsin’s fiscal troubles, only the beginning of a solution. Other states, counties, and cities, many of them in far worse economic condition than Wisconsin, face similar difficult choices in their futures, and no doubt will endure similar political convulsions, if not more severe ones. The pure-hearted idealists on the left will not give in easily -- not when there is a great deal of money at stake, along with raw political power and comfortable sinecures for those at the top of the public-sector foodchain. While we celebrate what has been won in Wisconsin, we must be mindful of the much more difficult work that remains to be done.

The Editors

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What Should We Do About Libya?

noreply@blogger.com (Norman C Hoffmann) — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 13:13:00 +0000

Experts weigh in.

ELLIOTT ABRAMS
There are things we should do and things we should not do.

The president of the United States should not make vain boasts and empty statements. As the president has said Qaddafi must go, we (the United States, not just the president) will look weak and foolish if he stays on and wins his war. Qaddafi can’t be permitted to defeat the United States.

#ad#Accordingly, I think we must ensure that he loses power and leaves the country. In the end, this may require a no-fly zone, and I do not think we should shrink from it. But there are many ways we can try to ensure Qaddafi’s defeat without having our guys fly over Tripoli 24 hours a day. We can ruin their runways, use missiles from offshore, ensure they get no further arms shipments by sea, stop any payments for oil shipments, interfere with command-and-control frequencies, help arms get to the opposition, give intelligence to the opposition. As it seems clear Gates and Mullen want to do nothing, the president ought to look for some independent advice (much as Bush did on Iraq) as to what is doable. And then he should do it.

--- Elliott Abrams, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, was the deputy national security adviser on the Middle East in the George W. Bush administration.

#page#MACKENZIE EAGLEN
If the president decides intervention is necessary in Libya, he must lay out specific objectives. Then, the administration should examine the various tools available -- including ours and our allies’ civil, military, and intelligence capabilities -- to meet those objectives. Finally, the president must openly acknowledge the risks of potential action, as well as the likely costs in financial and human capital.

The world will continue to look to America for leadership. Any action, including use of force, must be designed to advance long-term strategic goals.

#ad#Yesterday, the chief of naval operations told Congress a no-fly zone would begin combat operations inside Libya. But vital questions remain unanswered. What is the primary purpose of those operations? To protect civilians? To facilitate delivery of humanitarian assistance? To begin regime change? Will this be a shared, international operation? What are the opportunity costs -- e.g., will this divert military capabilities from ongoing operations?

For maximum effectiveness, military power must be used in a way that supports U.S. interests. It must also be used strategically -- in this case, as part of a larger plan that engages the Libyan opposition, garners international support, and uses appropriate military resources.

It is not yet clear how yesterday’s announcement fits in with these requirements.

--- Mackenzie Eaglen is a research fellow for national security at the Heritage Foundation.

#page#MOHAMED ELJAHMI
Qaddafi plays off the international community’s fear of illegal immigration and al-Qaeda. The truth, however, is that Qaddafi’s policies of oppression give rise to radicalism. In turn, Qaddafi benefits from illegal immigration, and the fear is intensified.

Qaddafi uses religion to propagate his politics, to affirm his rule, and to intimidate opponents. In 1970, he founded the Islamic Call Society (ICS), whose charter mandates proselytizing in Africa and elsewhere. The ICS still exists under the close supervision and guise of the Libyan External Security Organization, and its role has expanded to include subversion tactics and propaganda.

#ad#Qaddafi calls his opponents Zanadeqa (heretics) and hails himself the “imam of all Muslims.” During a July 2005 meeting with a state-controlled trade union, the crowd chanted, “We value and are proud of your imamship for millions of Muslims from East to West, so that the banner of Islam can be raised so high to fulfill the will of Allah.”

Before Qaddafi’s regime, Libyans participated in a constitutional democracy -- though not perfect, its abuses paled in comparison with the atrocities that are occurring in Libya today. For example, thousands of Libyans have died in peaceful marches calling for freedom and democracy.

The citizens’ struggle against Qaddafi’s rule is not equal -- nor do they have similar access to military supplies. He has planes, tens of thousands of security brigades, and the help of foreign mercenaries. Conversely, revolutionaries are lightly armed and at times have only their bodies to protect others against Qaddafi’s killing machine.

The U.N., under its responsibility and accountability to the international community, must protect the Libyan people from Qaddafi and his forces. In conjunction with the existent ICC inquiry, the U.N. must institute a no-fly zone over Libya, Qaddafi’s tanks and heavy weapons must be disbanded and removed immediately, foreign journalists must be protected, and all communication media must be restored.

The Libyan people are capable of using their nation’s wealth to build a thriving democratic country. Although it will be challenging to build and sustain the necessary institutions, Qaddafi must leave in order to facilitate this much-needed transition.

--- Mohamed Eljahmi is a Libyan-American activist.

#page#JAMIE FLY
On Monday, President Obama said, “We send a very clear message to the Libyan people that we will stand with them in the face of unwarranted violence and the continuing suppression of democratic ideals that we’ve seen there.”

Even the New York Times editorial page noted that “the Obama administration is throwing out so many conflicting messages on Libya that they are blunting any potential pressure on the Libyan regime and weakening American credibility.”

#ad#The president said almost a week ago that Moammar Qaddafi needed to leave, but his administration appears unwilling to do anything to back up his rhetoric with action, and a steady stream of administration officials have played down the likelihood of an immediate military operation.

The first (long overdue) step would be for the United States, along with European allies, to implement a no-fly zone, even a limited one that would cover the coastal towns and cities currently being contested by pro- and anti-regime forces. Further action, such as arming the rebels and eventually targeting regime assets being used to kill civilians, should also be considered.

It’s one thing to argue that for strategic or other reasons we should avoid getting involved in Libya. Given his statements condemning Qaddafi and the regime’s violent efforts to remain in power, the president doesn’t appear to believe this.

The president should fulfill the “moral obligation” he cited during his campaign in 2008 to intervene as quickly as possible to halt the bloodshed.

It’s time for the president to stop talking and take action.

--- Jamie M. Fly is executive director of the Foreign Policy Initiative.

#page#JOHN HANNAH
The president of the United States has publicly declared that Colonel Qaddafi must go. Failure to achieve that result in short order will be highly damaging to U.S. interests. American credibility and prestige among friends and foes alike -- already hemorrhaging under Obama -- will dissipate yet further, inviting greater dangers and challenges. Homicidal dictators -- even those, like Qaddafi, with rivers of American blood on their hands -- will know that they are safe to wage war on their own people with relative impunity. The balance between hope and fear in this springtime for Arab democracy will swing dangerously toward the dark side, increasing dramatically the risks that these movements will be hijacked by forces of extremism, terrorism, and anti-Americanism.

Absent outside intervention to aid the rebels, the greater the likelihood that the conflict will be prolonged, Qaddafi will survive, and U.S. interests will be seriously harmed. Rather than immediately engaging U.S. forces in the conflict through a no-fly zone or direct attacks on Qaddafi’s military assets, I would initially favor low-risk options to supply rebel forces with the means to get the job done themselves. Provide intelligence, ammunition, fuel, medical supplies, and communications systems. Quickly establish a train-and-equip program on lower-end anti-aircraft guns and missiles, anti-tank weapons, and artillery systems. In short, resurrect a version of the Reagan Doctrine.

#ad#Whatever form U.S. military assistance takes, I would also establish two diplomatic conditions. First, the rebels themselves must unequivocally ask for U.S. military help. It should not be hard for the head of the rebel council to find CNN’s Ben Wedeman in Benghazi to declare openly and in front of the world that, on behalf of the rebels, he has been authorized to request American aid in tilting the military balance in favor of the Libyan people. Second, I would require that U.S. intervention receive the public backing and active support of a coalition of the willing that includes a core group of key Arab and European states who have far more immediately at stake in Libya than we do, preferably including Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, the rest of the Gulf countries, Britain, France, Italy, and Germany.

--- John P. Hannah, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, served as national security adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney from 2005 to 2009.

#page#PETE HOEKSTRA
In recent years, Libya has been an ally in North Africa, forsaking its nuclear program and partnering with us to defeat al-Qaeda. However, the bonds between allies can be broken when one nation’s actions are antithetical to the principles and ideals of the other. Libya’s unjustifiably violent acts against its citizens have reached that point. The U.S. can no longer stand idly by and watch the turmoil in Libya.

America’s options are poor and limited, but we should not pass on the opportunity to display principled leadership.

#ad#First, America must take the lead by forcefully expressing support for American values. It is vital that the U.S. lead in promoting freedom, equality, and opportunity.

Second, the U.S. should support severe economic sanctions. American leadership must take a principled approach; the U.S. must not publicly condemn the attacks against Libyan citizens yet indirectly finance the war by continuing to trade with Libya.

Finally, establishing and enforcing a no-fly zone over Libya is an appropriate and measured response to its use of military aircraft against its citizens. America should not undertake this operation alone. The administration should emphasize that it will participate in this endeavor only with the full support and commitment of the international community.

--- Pete Hoekstra is former congressman from Michigan.

#page#RAYMOND IBRAHIM
As with Egypt, American sympathies instinctively side with Libya’s oppositional force as they seek to overthrow the tyrant Qaddafi -- and rightfully so. But where U.S. foreign policy is concerned, prudence is in order. This is especially the case considering that the Obama administration has evinced inconsistency and incoherence regarding the Middle East: It vowed not to “meddle” in behalf of Iranian dissidents, while eagerly pushing former U.S. ally Mubarak out. At the start of Egypt’s revolution, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Mubarak’s government was secure; a month later, he was toppled; and the administration is misguidedly open to talking with existential enemies, such as the Muslim Brotherhood.

The issue of oil looms large and is for some the primary impetus for U.S. intervention in Libya. Yet as others have long insisted, perhaps it is time to look at other options, such as drilling in Alaska or in the eastern Gulf of Mexico.

#ad#Because of Qaddafi’s eccentric nature -- the man has as many bizarre traits as he does last-name spellings -- few people take anything he says seriously. Yet, as top Muslim cleric Qaradawi issues a fatwa to kill Qaddafi, and Obama asks the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia to arm oppositional forces -- reminiscent of arming the Taliban against the Soviets (and we know how that turned out) -- one hopes that Qaddafi’s insistence that al-Qaeda/Islamists are major actors in the revolt does not turn out to be a classic case of the boy who cried wolf. Islamists and jihadists do have a knack of turning up where least expected and filling power vacuums.

That Qaddafi is an anti-American and tyrannical thug, there is no doubt. Yet, unless the administration has a clear and focused policy on what it wants to accomplish in Libya -- one beneficial to all concerned -- it may be best to let the Middle East’s latest survival-of-the-fittest installment play out and go from there.

--- Raymond Ibrahim is associate director of the Middle East Forum.

#page#JOSHUA MURAVCHIK
Benghazi could become the new Guernica. With warplanes, tanks, heavy weaponry, mercenaries, financial reserves, and, reportedly, direct military intervention by Syria’s air force, Qaddafi could possibly crush the uprising of the Libyan people, who are lightly armed. This would tell dictators across the globe that if you cavil at shedding blood you will go down, but if you are ruthless you will survive.

Qaddafi’s triumph, following the fall of neighboring pro-American dictators, would also make for further erosion of U.S. standing in the Mideast. And it would feed resentment, as when we abandoned Iraq’s Shiites to Saddam’s tender mercies in 1991.

#ad#The U.S. should impose a no-fly zone and deliver arms to the rebels -- preferably with NATO, but without if necessary. To counter Qaddafi’s claim that we have designs on Libya, Washington should say loudly and often that our goal is free elections under U.N. supervision.

We should not, however, seek U.N. authorization for the military measures. To acquiesce in the claim that the U.N. Security Council (meaning Moscow and Beijing) is the arbiter of the legitimate use of force in the world is terribly dangerous. This claim rests on the U.N. Charter, but the Charter also provides for an effective U.N. military apparatus to enforce international peace and security that never came into being.

--- Joshua Muravchik, a fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, is the author of The Next Founders: Voices of Democracy in the Middle East.

#page#DAVID PRYCE-JONES
Three weeks ago, Libya was blowing up, and the right thing would have been immediately to send a battle group to the Mediterranean. There are only four airfields in Libya, and it would have been possible to establish a no-fly zone at no cost. This would have given the anti-Qaddafi forces a chance, and they could have been helped with organization and financing, and if they so demanded, with weaponry.

#ad#The absence of any forward policy has doomed these forces. They will have the impression that the West’s inertia derives from lack of interest and loss of self-confidence. A few may fight to the end, but most are likely to try to escape the coming repression. All that can now be done is to freeze Libyan assets, impose sanctions, and persuade as many countries as possible to ostracize Qaddafi, with penalties at least for Western businesses who try to profiteer in the aftermath of the crisis. But there it is: By doing nothing, we have made ourselves accomplices of Qaddafi. It is truly ominous that he has no real power base yet has made rings round what was supposed to be a superpower.

--- David Pryce-Jones is a senior editor of NR.

#page#MICHAEL RUBIN
President Obama’s inaction in the face of Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi’s counteroffensive will have lasting consequences. The United States is still paying for the elder President Bush’s 1991 decision to stand idle as Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein crushed the Shiite revolt. Bush’s realist aides counseled passivity. After all, the Iraqi people had already taken 14 out of 18 provinces. Bush feared that any American support for the rebels might taint their cause and be a slippery slope toward entanglement. In hindsight, though, Bush’s willingness to see Saddam reconsolidate control forced the Iraqi Shiites to embrace Iran as their protector, and set the United States down the path toward greater conflict.

Obama should not make the same mistake twice: He should immediately impose both a no-fly and a no-tactical-vehicle zone over areas controlled by Qaddafi. Libya is not Iraq, and a no-fly zone need not set the United States down the path to a wider war. While Saddam had 500,000 men under arms, Qaddafi had only 50,000, of whom press reports suggest only one-tenth remain. Beyond American carriers in the Mediterranean, Sigonella Air Station in Sicily is closer to the no-fly area than Incirlik Air Base was to Iraq. The United States should reach out toward Libyans to remind them that Washington is on their side, with both leaflet drops and daily statements to be broadcast on Radio Sawa. Taxpayer-funded Arabic radio should promote freedom, not Lady Gaga.

#ad#Lastly, Libya’s upheaval underlines the importance of domestic energy security. Obama must enable drilling and exploration anywhere the United States can, and enable American companies to process shale oil, exploit coal reserves, reinvest in nuclear energy, and use other alternative sources.

--- Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

#page#BENJAMIN WEINTHAL
The Obama administration should end its erratic course with pro-democracy movements in the Muslim world. Libyan opponents of Qaddafi’s lethal repression are showing a bottomless level of courage and deserve concrete assistance from the U.S. and the EU. “Obama: Are you with us or against us?” asked Iranian democrats during the 2009 protests against the fraudulent presidential election. He left those brave Iranian democrats out in the cold. Obama is -- one could argue -- confronted with the same question in Libya.

The highly repressive and closed society of Libya is a kind of mirror image of the Mullah regime in Tehran. If 41 years of Qaddafi-style totalitarianism can be dislodged, then 32 years of high-intensity revolutionary Iranian-style fascism could face the same fate.

#ad#President Obama and his NATO and EU allies ought to swiftly introduce a no-fly zone over Libya, including a strict ban against low-altitude helicopter flights. Violations of the no-fly zone should entail military strikes against transgressors. Anti-aircraft weaponry should be rapidly delivered to anti-Qaddafi forces.

The WikiLeaks cables showed American diplomats at their finest: They were terribly concerned about the lack of democracy and human rights. Obama has an amazing opportunity to end his zigzagging in the region and show that America’s democracy language is not merely empty rhetoric.

--- Benjamin Weinthal is a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

NRO Symposium

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Not Reconciled to a Darned Thing...

noreply@blogger.com (Norman C Hoffmann) — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 12:17:00 +0000

Believe me, I am as desirous as the next guy to have a rallying-point in the 2012 Presidential election field. Obviously, we conservatives yearn for solid, thoroughgoing leadership. We want, we pray, for a Reagan, a Goldwater, a Taft. Glumly, we find it lacking. We noodle around, finding glimmers of hope in the most middling of circumstances, saying that, in essence, if we squint, and the light is just so, this candidate or that candidate will suit our purposes well enough.

I’m not ready to do that, especially knowing the first debate/beauty-contest doesn’t even happen until June.

I remember John Connolly revving up his presidential snow-blower in the dark and cold days of the winter of 1979, running ads as the only guy that, as a former Democrat and paleo-neo-Republican, was the only person craftily situated to beat Jimmy Carter. I’m not sure the Connolly candidacy lasted until the first debate.

Elections, especially primary elections, are about the winnowing process itself: Who is the most articulate conservative spokesman? Who is the least able to be ruffled in a tight squeeze? Who can dispatch leftist/media complex attacks with the greatest of ease? Who generates excitement, and gets everyone to the polls? Absolutely none of this is known today, and likely won’t be known, until roughly the first of February, 2012.

Oh, I understand the realpolitik argumentation of getting behind a candidate early: Such a person can raise more money, garner more headlines, and so on. But, just remember Walter Mondale: He was the front-runner against Reagan starting in about 1982. Jesse Jackson and Gary Hart, though, held the excitement throughout the primary season, and there was a palpable sense that Mondale never, ever, really stood a chance. But, the union money was always flowing toward Mondale, and the others never really got traction. If they had, it is possible that Reagan may have been denied his 49-state landslide. He still would have won, but it may not have been such a bloodbath.

And also, at this point, I will not reconcile myself to anyone that I discern is soft on Liberty, soft on defense of our Constitution, soft on small, quiet in-the-background government. I will not reconcile myself to a candidate that runs a vanity campaign that seeks self to please.

My antennae right now are very keen to pick up the slightest vibrations of powerful leadership, those candidates for ANY federal office that deign to call a spade a spade. By this, I mean anyone who will call the Obama Administration truly, empirically lawless, or who doesn’t shrink from engaging the conservative, constitutional agenda with full-throated strength. Candidates that go all mealy-mouthed, and insist that we only need to trim the edges of Obamacare, or that Green Energy really is something to be considered, or that radicalized political Islam really isn’t that big a shake– well, I won’t get very excited to campaign and work on behalf of such a candidate.

Especially not in March of 2011. Maybe, as a last, desperate attempt to keep Barack Obama out of the White House for four more years, say, long about October 30th, 2012. But absolutely NOT now.

Peter King�"s Important Service

noreply@blogger.com (Norman C Hoffmann) — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 12:04:00 +0000

Rep. Peter King is being demonized for holding hearings on a problem that Attorney General Holder says �Skeeps me up at night.⬝

Betty Friedan famously wrote about “the problem that has no name.” Decades later, domestic Islamic radicalism bids fair to become the new nameless problem, at least if the Left gets its way.

The outraged reaction to the hearings being held by Rep. Peter King (R., N.Y.) to look into the radicalization of the domestic Muslim community was so mindless it bordered on a collective self-lobotomy. The late conservative intellectual James Burnham once wrote that “liberalism permits Western civilization to be reconciled to its dissolution.” If the House committee devoted to homeland security -- which held hearings on “The Future of FEMA’s Grant Programs Directorate” among sundry other topics during the past two years -- can’t examine why some Muslims born and raised in the United States wage war on their own country, we might as well turn off the lights on our common culture.

#ad#There’s no denying the fact of domestic radicalization. “It is one of the things that keeps me up at night,” Attorney General Eric Holder said in an interview with ABC News last year. “The threat has changed from simply worrying about foreigners coming here, to worrying about people in the United States, American citizens.” Holder once called us a nation of cowards for not discussing race enough; his own party is positively lily-livered about discussing the very threat that makes him lose sleep.

For daring to delve into what has Holder so worried, King was savaged as a new Joe McCarthy creating the predicate for the mass internment of Muslims. If King is the equivalent of “Tail-Gunner Joe,” what does that make Sens. Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins, a moderate Democrat and a moderate Republican, respectively, who lead the Senate counterpart of King’s committee? According to its website, “Since 2006, the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee has investigated the threat facing the United States from homegrown terrorism and domestic radicalization inspired by violent Islamist extremism.” And not one Muslim family has been sent to an internment camp.

If there’s an association between terrorism and Islam, it’s not King’s fault. It’s the handiwork of Maj. Nidal Hasan, who allegedly shouted “Allahu Akbar!” while gunning down 13 people at Fort Hood, and all the other home-grown extremists who have perpetrated or attempted mayhem in the name of Allah.

King called two witnesses who had heart-rending stories to tell, Melvin Bledsoe and Abdirizak Bihi. Bledsoe’s son Carlos converted to Islam in college, changed his name to Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, and stands accused of killing a U.S. soldier at an Arkansas recruiting center. After becoming radicalized, Bihi’s nephew was killed in Somalia in 2009. Bihi maintains that Muslim leaders in the Minneapolis area urged him not to warn law enforcement about his nephew’s disappearance. “They threatened me, intimidated me, and not only me but whole families,” Bihi told the committee.

Democrats evinced very little curiosity about Bledsoe or Bihi. For them, the very act of calling these gentlemen to testify represented the threat to America. The reliably insipid Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D., Texas) brandished a U.S. Constitution that she insisted “is in pain.” She must think that the First Amendment reads, “Congress shall hold no hearing respecting Islamic radicalization . . .”

Jackson Lee suggested the committee take on the “cold cases” from the South of the civil-rights era, while her colleague Rep. Gene Green (D., Texas) urged King to investigate the KKK. For a segment of the Left, American racism is still the only true source of evil. Misogynist, Jew-hating, infidel-killing Muslim extremists don’t quite measure up.

If King had convened a hearing on the threat of salt to our health and lives, committee Democrats no doubt would have pored over every variant -- refined, unrefined, iodized -- of the damnable substance. They can’t summon the same feeling for investigating Islamic extremism, considering such an inquiry an offense against multiculturalism. The Democrats made King’s first hearing a circus. He nonetheless achieved an important, if inadvertent, success: exposing his critics as hysterical fools.

Rich Lowry

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All Aboard the Climate Gravy Train

noreply@blogger.com (Norman C Hoffmann) — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 11:50:00 +0000

There was a time when climate scientists were not extremely well paid, but that is no longer the case.

Global-warming alarmists often portray climate scientists as poorly paid academics whose judgment is impervious to the influence of money. This seems strange given the billions of taxpayer dollars that have been invested in climate science over the past few years. And as the public-choice school of economics has clearly shown, the opportunity for reward affects even supposedly disinterested professionals.

Therefore, it is fair to ask: Just how well rewarded are climate scientists? As it turns out, by some measures they are paid as well as corporate CEOs.

#ad#When it comes to comparing the annual salaries of various professions, there is an obvious problem. Some work extremely long hours -- about 2,600 a year for firefighters -- while others work far fewer -- 1,400 a year for teachers. To iron out this difficulty, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ National Compensation Survey converts yearly salaries into hourly pay. From that we can see that teachers, at $37.91 an hour, are actually much more highly paid than firefighters, at $21.68 an hour, despite their comparable annual salaries ($53,000 for teachers, $55,000 for firefighters).

What about climate scientists? Well, university lecturers and professors earn an average of $49.88 an hour over a 1,600-hour work year, for a total salary of about $80,000. In the public sector, “atmospheric, earth, marine, and space sciences teachers, postsecondary” earn considerably more than the average university teacher ($70.61 per hour). They also work much less (1,471 hours each year), and despite their lower workload, they pull down about $104,000 a year. Climate scientists’ hourly pay ranks them higher than business-school teachers at public universities, who earn $63.35 an hour, but not public-sector law-school professors, who earn over $100 an hour.

So climate scientists are very well compensated, out-earning all other faculty outside of law in hourly-wage terms. What about the rest of the public sector? Astonishingly, only one other public-sector profession -- psychiatrist -- pays better than climate science, at just over $73 an hour. In other words, climate scientists have the third-highest-paid public-sector job, ranking above judges.

What about the private sector? That’s led by airline pilots, who earn about $112 an hour, but work for only 1,100 hours a year, followed by company CEOs at an average of $91 an hour. Physicians and surgeons earn almost as much as CEOs, at $89.51 an hour. Private-sector law-school professors, interestingly enough, earn far less than their public-school counterparts, at $82 an hour. After that come professor-level jobs in engineering, at $76.11, and dentists, at $73.19. These are the only private-sector professions that pay more than climate science. Taking the public and private sectors together, by my reckoning, climate scientist is the tenth-highest-paid profession in the nation.

Bear in mind that these averages are statistical means, and are therefore inflated by extremely high salaries at the top end, particularly in the case of CEOs and physicians. If we look at median earnings -- what the earner right in the middle of the pack gets -- we see that climate scientists get $75.29 an hour, compared with private-sector CEOs at $75.48 and physicians at $81.73.

The story gets even more interesting when we look back at the figures from 2005, the year before Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth launched the current wave of climate alarmism. Back then, university teachers were paid $43.16 an hour, while climate scientists were paid $54.65 an hour. In other words, climate-science compensation has risen by 30 percent in five years, while pay for other university instructors has increased by only 15 percent.

There was a time when climate scientists were not extremely well paid, but that is no longer the case. Not only have their earnings grown far faster than their colleagues’, but on an hourly basis they now earn as much as CEOs. When climate skeptics talk about a global-warming gravy train, the numbers back them up.

--- Iain Murray heads the Center for Economic Freedom at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.

Iain Murray

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The DOJ and ATF: GUNRUNNER is about to explode

noreply@blogger.com (Norman C Hoffmann) — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 11:35:00 +0000

In an article on the Foxnews website, there is a story that just raises all kinds of alarm bells and the makings of a major scandal. The title of the story says it all: “ATF, DOJ Launch Damage Control Effort Over Growing Project Gunrunner Scandal”.

It seems under the watchful eye of the Dept of Justice, the ATF was supervising the purchase of AK-47’s in Arizona by “strawman buyers” for the drug cartels in Mexico. It seems this was allowed to go on to the tune of thousands of guns. The gun shop owners asked agents directly if the should stop selling them, and the agents expressly told them to keep selling them so they could track them. The only problem is that they didn’t track them and they didn’t stop the sales.

It was conceived after the bureau was criticized for not conducting more complex investigations on straw buyers — people who were allowed to purchase guns legally in the U.S.– who illegally transport� guns into Mexico and sell them to cartels.
So rather than just take down low-level straw buyers here and there, the agency hoped by �letting the guns walk� the sales would lead investigators to cartel members higher up in the organization.
However, whistle-blowers say that never happened.

The worse part is that many of these guns have already been tied to a lot of murders, rapes and robberies!

Now everyone is scurrying to damage control. The Justice Dept lawyers is refusing to answer Sen. Charles Grassley’s questions. Sen. Patrick Leahy is refusing to hold hearings or allow the posting of the documents to the Senate web site. The ATF is already instructing agents to make sure “good news stories” are delivered to the press to counter act possible bad press that may occur.

Now the question is this President Obama’s Iran-Contra? This really has that kind of potential. As they say, it is the coverup that is worse than the crime and the coverup is already starting.

Not Reconciled to a Darned Thing...

noreply@blogger.com (Norman C Hoffmann) — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 03:16:00 +0000

Believe me, I am as desirous as the next guy to have a rallying-point in the 2012 Presidential election field. Obviously, we conservatives yearn for solid, thoroughgoing leadership. We want, we pray, for a Reagan, a Goldwater, a Taft. Glumly, we we find it lacking. We noodle around, finding glimmers of hope in the most middling of circumstances, saying that, in essence, if we squint, and the light is just so, this candidate or that candidate will do just fine.

I’m not ready to do that, especially knowing the first debate/beauty-contest doesn’t even happen until June.

Especially not in March of 2011. Maybe, as a last, desperate attempt to keep Barack Obama out of the White House for four more years, say, long about October 30th, 2012. But absolutely NOT now.

Second Damaging NPR Video Released, Executive Put on Leave, Questions Arise About First Video

noreply@blogger.com (Norman C Hoffmann) — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 03:07:00 +0000

James O' Keefe released a second NPR video, this time the target was NPR exeutive Betsy Liley who was also in in the first video. Liley, NPR's senior director of institutional giving, is featured on the phone with the fictitious members of the Muslim brotherhood, who were looking for a way to donate five million dollars anonymously. Liley said that she would indeed be willing to find a way to shield the donors from a government audit by keeping the donor's name anonymous.

In a lengthy follow-up phone call with Liley after the lunch, an O'Keefe associate posing as "Ibrahim Kasaam " of the Muslim Education Action Center (a fictitious entity) expressed concerns that NPR, which receives government funding, would be subject to government audits or would have to disclose the source of its donations.

Liley responded, "If you were concerned about that, you might want to be an anonymous donor and we would certainly, if that was your interest, we would want to shield you from that."

At another point, Kasaam asked Liley, "It sounded like you're saying that NPR would be able to shield us from a government audit, is that correct?"

"I think that is the case, especially if you were anonymous, and I can inquire about that," Liley said. She later informed Kasaam via e-mail that NPR's management had cleared an anonymous donation from his group.

Based on the video (embedded below) NPR put Liley on administrative leave. Anna Christopher NPR spokeswoman, commented that, "All donations, anonymous and named, are reported to the IRS. NPR complies fully with all tax and financial disclosure regulations."

As the second video was released (below), the first video was called into question by The Blaze. Reviewing both the released version and the raw video the Blaze found that in many cases the clips were cut in a way that made Mr. Schiller look worse than he actually was. The end result may not have been different but the parts left on the cutting room floor would have mitigated some of Mr. Schiller's statements. After you watch the video below I urge you to read this post at the Blaze.

Read More... [Source: YID With LID]

Governor Walker. Hang this debacle around Obama�s neck.

noreply@blogger.com (Norman C Hoffmann) — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 02:55:00 +0000

Imagine for a moment an alternate universe, where a Democrat governor and Democrat state legislature have their state capitol besieged by violent Tea Party protesters (Like I said, alternate universe). Imagine that those protesters agitating for a conservative agenda rushed police trying to secure the capitol; smashed windows; broke doors off hinges; locked other doors from the inside with handcuffs; threatened to disallow legislators into the capitol to do the people�s business; and even sent violent death threats to those Democrat lawmakers. Imagine it.

Imagine that in that alternate universe, the President of the United States openly stood in solidarity with those violent protesters, calling the efforts of that Democrat governor an �attack� on the Tea Party, and commanding his labor secretary to get involved. Imagine that Republican President�s campaign arm mobilizing to bus in those Tea Partiers from all across the country to join in their siege of the state capitol against those Democrats. Imagine it.

Does anyone doubt for a moment that in that alternate universe, a concerted, effective, and accurate effort would not be made by those Democrats to hang the debacle unfolding around the neck of the Republican President? Anyone?

At the very moment that the Wisconsin Democrat senators chose to flee to Illinois rather than do their duty as public servants, Governor Scott Walker had the initiative. It appeared at the outset that he was ready to do what was necessary to not only emerge from the situation with a righteous victory, but to maintain the initiative and public support throughout. But he miscalculated. Gravely.

He refused to play hardball, even though all indications were that the organized effort against him was mobilizing out of his control. He should have known that the Democrats fleeing was simply a stalling tactic to allow the Left to mobilize its demagoguery machine, and he should have known that a Leftist media would be working with the unions against him to shape public opinion.

Walker had choices to make the moment the Democrats fled, and he made many wrong choices. He should have seen what was happening, and immediately pushed the legislature to schedule votes on the entire laundry list of conservative items. Concealed Carry, Voter ID, and Right to Work should have all been advanced. Then he should have rightfully come to the conclusion that was reached yesterday � that the collective bargaining measures in the budget bill needed to be separated out and voted on.

And last but not least, the moment the unions mobilized to swarm the capitol, Scott Walker should have begun a strategy of imploring the President of the United States to call off his union thugs, and stand in solidarity with the democratic process.

But he did none of those things. To his credit, he held the line. But he continued to hope that Democrats and union members would behave like rational human beings. Wasted time. He could have spent that time advancing the peoples� agenda, and hanging this debacle around the neck of Barack Hussein Obama, the Community Agitator-in-Chief. Now here we are a full three weeks later. The Wisconsin capitol is in disarray, and Republican legislators are being threatened with their very lives. Walker and the Wisconsin GOP will get their way, but at a very high price that never needed to be paid.

This Republican proclivity of always seeking to stand on genteel ground while they are dealing with the Devil has simply GOT to be overcome if this republic is to survive the malevolent intentions of the Left. The GOP can win elections, but it has no political killer instinct when it comes to governing. It has been demonstrated time, and time, and time again that when Republicans assume that Democrats are gentlemen (and ladies) who will respond rationally to Republican overtures and assumptions of best intentions, Republicans � and the American people � are overrun by a Left willing to do anything in service of their agenda.

One of the first things Scott Walker should have done was to understand that when Barack Hussein Obama inserted himself into the situation with commentary, his bureaucracy, and his campaign machine, the President became fair game. Obama provided himself as a perfect tool for Scott Walker, and Walker failed to see it.

Governor Walker, you�ve squandered the initiative for the people of Wisconsin, and I daresay, for the people of the United States. But it�s still not too late to drag the President of the United States into the situation for your benefit. It�s not too late to turn this situation against Obama. Hang the illegal and unethical actions of his union thug supporters around his neck, now. Your state capitol is in disarray, as I type � in lockdown. Call on the President to ask his union thug supporters to back off, go home, and behave like decent human beings in accordance with the will of the people as expressed through the democratic process last November. All it takes is a little imagination to see that if the show was on the other foot, the Democrats would be doing exactly as I propose, to their benefit.

And here�s the bonus governor: You know he won�t do it no matter how much you implore, so the GOP can hold him accountable to the standard you set by asking. (That’s an Alinsky tactic, by the way)

HT: Roy Rogers @ “It�s About Liberty”, a conservative forum, for the idea.

Crossposted at www.itsaboutliberty.com

Iranian Propaganda: The 12th Imam is Near and Ahmadinejad is Going To Lead His Army

noreply@blogger.com (Norman C Hoffmann) — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 02:10:00 +0000

Last month, on the 32nd anniversary of the overthrow of the Shah Iranian President Ahmadinejad spoke of a New Middle East spurred by the by the Egyptian revolution and hastened by the 12th Imam. This new Middle East would be free of the United States and Israel, as he warned Egyptians to be watchful of America's "friendly face."

"We will soon see a new Middle East materialising without America and the Zionist regime and there will be no room for world arrogance (the West) in it," Ahmadinejad told the cheering crowds who gathered despite the cold and cloudy weather.

"They (the United States) have adopted a friendly face and saying 'we are friends of people of North Africa and Arab countries', but be watchful and united. You will be victorious," he said.

Then Ahmadinejad brought up his messianic beliefs saying the world was witnessing a revolution managed by Imam Mehdi, the 12th Shiite imam who disappeared down a well as a five-year-old in the 10th century and who Shiites believe would return on the judgment day when the world is covered with blood and chaos

"The final move has begun. We are in the middle of a world revolution managed by this dear (12th Imam). A great awakening is unfolding. One can witness the hand of Imam in managing it," said Ahmadinejad.....

"Come and take away the Zionist regime which is the source of all crimes... take it away and liberate the region. Free the region and give it to the people and take this regime, which is the child of Satan (the United States), out."

Ahmadinejad and the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei practice the Hojjatieh's interpretation of Shiism. This type of Islam has a very messianic and apocalyptic view of the world. It predicts a period of universal chaos before the return of the Mahdi (the 12th imam, also known as the hidden imam, a Muslim version of the Messiah). This version of Islam is so radical that even the leader of the revolution against the Shah, Ayatollah Khomeini banned its practice in 1983.

Ahmadinejad has claimed that it is the role of his government to bring about the return of the 12th Imam. On August 29, 2007, Ahmadinejad said,

"The Iranian nation and the Islamic Revolution have a pivotal role in preparing the ground for the coming of the Hidden Imam... We must rapidly develop Iran in order to create the [right] conditions for his coming, and we must also help the rest of the world's nations [to prepare for his return], in order to precipitate this great event...

Taubmann reports that Ahmadinejad believes he personally has been chosen by Allah to hasten the return of this Muslim messiah. The way to achieve this goal for the Iranian president is the occurrence of a nuclear Holocaust. And this is why it is so vital for Ahmadinejad that Iran acquires a nuclear weapon.

The video below is a documentary from Iran (its in Farsi with subtitles). According to the video it was created by the Ulema, the Iranian Muslim scholars who hold much power.

The video is teaching that the coming of the 12th Imam is very near, that Iran, with the help of Hassan Nasrallah the leader of Hezballah will lead the way, Israel (specifically Jerusalem) will be the first target. It ties in today's mid east events to the radical Hojjatieh interpretation of Shiism.

I find this video very frightening, not because I am a follower of the Hojjatieh interpretation of Islam (they didn't teach that in Hebrew School), but because the leaders of Iran believe it.

The first rule of negotiation is to understand the wants and needs of the opposite side. If the United States truly wants to convince Iran to give up its nuclear program through negotiation, it must first cast aside political correctness to learn and understand what the Iranian government's real goals Until our government understands this Iranian belief, we will never be able to deal with them through peaceful needs.

(if you cannot see video below click here)

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Sheila Jackson Lee Has Juvenile Hissy Fit At at Radical Islam Hearing

noreply@blogger.com (Norman C Hoffmann) — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 01:33:00 +0000

With each passing day we learn more about Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee. It as been long known that she is not the sharpest crayon in the playroom, her gaffes are legendary (only they aren't gaffes she really believe this nonsense). There was the time she stood on the floor of the house discussing how North and South Vietnam are living peacefully side by side, even though there hasn't been a North and South Vietnam since Gerald Ford was President, or when she told the House Judiciary Committee that the �penalty� which the health-care law imposes on individuals who do not buy health insurance is not in fact a penalty.

Last week the Daily Caller examined Jackson-Lee's management skills, and it wasn't pretty. Ms Lee might be the nastiest boss in the entire city of Washington, D.C.

Today we saw another part of Jackson-Lee's personality as she threw a juvenile hissy fit during Peter King's committee hearing on the radicalization of some Muslims in the US.

During the testimony of LA County Sheriff Baca, Jackson-Lee asked Baca a question about his deputies� outreach to minority groups. When Baca mentioned that he had a Muslim officer accompanying him, Lee began clapping.

That drew a reprimand from Peter King, who admonished all member and guests to avoid "outbursts" that's when Jackson-Lee's famous temper took over.

But the best part was the dead pan comment of the next congressman. "That's a tough act to follow."

Watch the sorrowful incident below (if you cannot see video click here)

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The Missing Jeff Dunetz/Larry O'Connor Stage Right CPAC Interview

noreply@blogger.com (Norman C Hoffmann) — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 00:56:00 +0000

It was one month ago today, I sat down with Breitbart TV aficionado and star of the Stage Right Radio Show Larry O' Connor. As with any conversation with Larry the interview was both fun and thought provoking. I thought you might enjoy seeing it. Now before you say, why did you take so long to post it...the honest answer is I couldn't find it. You the interview started when I interrupted Larry doing a promo for his CPAC coverage and he forgot to change the set up title, so it was filed under I'll be giving a live CPAC 2011 update in 5 minutes---5 minutes, one month...ah whats the difference. I hope you enjoy this as much as I did..(if you cannot see video below click here)

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Why Does the Media Report the Opposite of What's True in the Middle East?

noreply@blogger.com (Norman C Hoffmann) — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 00:47:00 +0000

By Barry Rubin

Here's one of a thousand examples of how Middle East reality is being misrepresented. I'm told by people that the deputy head of the Muslim Brotherhood gave an interview stating that his organization was ready to accept the treaty with Israel.

In fact, however, if you examine the actual text he says...the exact opposite!

[Al-Bayoumi] We respect international agreements...however...it is the right of either side, or any one side, to review and discuss according to the circumstances and requirements. The Camp David Accords were never put to the people or even to the parliament in the proper manner, but rather these were enforced from above. One of the most important articles of this agreement was the establishment of a Palestinian State, very well, but let us ask: where is this [Palestinian] state?

"Secondly, where is this comprehensive peace in light of the daily massacres and brutal attacks that the Palestinians are subject to? Who has destroyed this agreement, in light of the genocidal plans against the Palestinian people, and the systematic move to Judaize Jerusalem and destroy the al-Aqsa Mosque? There is also the issue of the secret articles included in this accord, from selling Egyptian natural gas to Israel at a fifteenth of its real price. All of this must be put to the people, and it is the people's right to reconsider the conventions. Of course, we do not accept the Camp David Accords at all, but reevaluating and dealing with this must be done according to the law."

So in other words:

--Egypt can revise an international treaty whenever it chooses.

--The treaty isn't legal since it was never properly and legally confirmed in Egypt.

--The treaty isn't binding because it has not been implemented.

--Israel is evil and murderous so you can't and shouldn't want to make peace with it. Oh, and Israel has also abrogated the treaty anyway.

--The Brotherhood opposes the treaty.

--So it will submit it to a national referendum where the treaty will be rejected and thus it can be thrown away legally.

Now I'm not saying all of this is going to happen, but for such a statement to be turned on its head into claiming the Brotherhood accepts the treaty is part of the madness we are facing in understanding events in Egypt and the wider Middle East.

Indeed, at least four top-ranking Muslim Brotherhood leaders have said similar things about their rejecting the treaty, yet all one could read about is that they don't reject it!

But we are seeing a lot of this nowadays on coverage and analysis of the Middle East:

1. It is apparently not necessary actually to know anything about the region in order to explain developments and predict the future.

2. No one ever needs to examine Arabic-language sources.

3. Only what is said in English is important, especially if it is said to a reporter or "expert." That means the only two types of people to be considered in gathering information are:

A. Middle-class, urban, English-speaking democracy advocates who are then cast as representing the entire population ofthe country.

B. Middle-class,urban, English-speaking Islamists who are intent on proving they are nice, moderate people to journalists and "experts" whose naivete sets world records.

4. What is important is not what someone in the region says or does but what you want them to say or do in order to fit your theme.

5. The themes include: The Palestinians want peace; Israel doesn't; Islamists are no threat; they aren't haters of Jews and the West and they don't want to establish tyrannical repressive regimes.

Thus, for example, the fact that the Palestinian Authorty has refused to negotiate seriously with Israel for more than two years and now seeks a unilateral recognition of independence without having to negotiate with Israel at all (or make any concessions) has no relevance. Yet this, like masses of other evidence that disproves almost everything being said in the Western media, is easily publicly available and the facts themselves aren't the least bit controversial.

With a few exceptions, having no idea what happened until last week is also helpful in making a mess of things. If one argues that free elections produce democracy, how can one explain the examples of Hamas and Hizballah taking over? If participation in elections moderates people how can one explain the examples of Hamas, Hizballah, and the failure of Yasir Arafat to follow that pattern in the 1990s?

One doesn't have to explain at all because either the journalist or "expert" isn't aware of these issues or just doesn't mention them.

What about the reader or viewer? Well he/she doesn't know because a real alternative view almost never appears. Op-eds saying that Syria would break away from Iran and become pro-Western (the Obama Administration still believes this!) or that the Muslim Brotherhood is moderate outnumber the opposite view by at least five to one. And the same applies to the people quoted or appearing on television.

In the modern history of North American and European democracies there has never been a disinformation and misinformation campaign like this one.

Barry Rubin is Director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His books include Islamic Fundamentalists in Egyptian Politics and The Muslim Brotherhood (Palgrave-Macmillan); and The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East, a study of Arab reform movements (Wiley). GLORIA Center site: http://www.gloria-center.org His blog, Rubin Reports, http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com.
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Muslim Brotherhood's New Effort: Seize Control of Egypt's Islamic Institutions

noreply@blogger.com (Norman C Hoffmann) — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 18:10:00 +0000

By Barry Rubin

This is of gigantic importance (see if anyone else covers it). MEMRI has pointed out the opening of a Muslim Brotherhood campaign to replace Egypt's current clerical hierarchy with its own people. If that happens...you can imagine. Once Islamists are in place making the "official" decisions on what constitutes proper Islam, an Islamist state cannot be far away.

Let me explain the background briefly. Knowing that control over Islam was vital to maintaining control of the country, the Egyptian regime (like nationalist regimes elsewhere) set out to build a systematic structure for doing so. The head of the al-Azhar Islamic university, the chief qadi, the clerics of different mosques, are government-appointed. Sermons are government-approved. A ministry in charge of awqaf (religious foundations) and religion supervises all of this and hands out the money. And the government also decides which clerics appear on television and radio, or even have their own programs.

Over the last decade or so, the "official" clerics have been radicalized, and they support terrorism against Israel. Yet there is still a huge gap between those who accepted the rule by Mubarak's regime and those who demand an Islamist regime. They hate the Brotherhood and the Brotherhood hates them.

Now, if all of these official clerics are declared to be corrupt instruments of the old regime and are thrown out of office, the Brotherhood will control "Islam" in Egypt. Equally important, they will control a vast amount of patronage and money. Every cleric will have to get along with them or be unemployed. They could authorize which mosques could open. They would control religious education.

If the Brotherhood is a participant in government, even as a junior member of a coalition, its highest priority will be the religious affairs ministry. To call this dangerous is an understatement.

So we should watch carefully this battle over who governs Islam in Egypt.

To save you a click, here is what Muhammad Zoghbi of the Brotherhood says:

"Al-Azhar was subjected to...the politicization of the positions of the sheikh of Al-Azhar and the mufti of Egypt, as well as the position of the minister of religious endowments. These positions must be filled through elections. By no means should these officials be appointed by the president....

"Therefore I say to the 'sons' of Al-Azhar: Let us all join the campaign, led by Sheik Khaled Al-Gindi, until we liberate Al-Azhar, just like Egypt was liberated....The president of Egypt must be subordinate to Al-Azhar and respect it....

"Therefore, I say to the sheikh of Al-Azhar...resign immediately....The mufti and the minister of religious endowments should step down, leaving their positions to God-fearing imams...."

"God-fearing" imams means Muslim Brotherhood cadre. The president of Egypt "must be subordinate" to al-Azhar means an Islamist state. This strategy also suggests that the Brotherhood is recognizing that it will not choose Egypt's next president--who is more likely to be the nationalist Amr Moussa--so it must start building an independent base of support outside of the government's and president's control for its long march toward Islamism at a later date.

Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His books include Islamic Fundamentalists in Egyptian Politics and The Muslim Brotherhood (Palgrave-Macmillan); and The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East, a study of Arab reform movements (Wiley). GLORIA Center site: http://www.gloria-center.org His blog, Rubin Reports, http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com.
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Redstate's purposes and how BEST to carry them out

noreply@blogger.com (Norman C Hoffmann) — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 17:37:00 +0000

I took a look at the professed purposes of Redstate, which you can find here (Go to Help, click on the �rules for posting�).

Here they are:

The purpose of RedState.com is:
* to promote conservative ideals within the vehicle of the Republican Party,
* to clean house in the Republican party,
* to help elect conservative Republicans,
* and to encourage and educate conservative Republican activists committed to the above.

These are very good purposes. And it seems to me the best, most effective way to carry them out is for each of us to become a �player� inside the Republican Party. And that means becoming a precinct committeemen, if possible. And in the unlikely event that all the slots are filled, no matter � just become a �helper� to another precinct committeeman and learn the ropes and help out until a vacancy comes into being. Indeed, on average, in every locale in the country, more than half of the precinct committeeman slots are unfilled, so you’ll have a very good chance of filling up a slot that’s begging for a warm, conservative body. Yours.

Back to the Redstate purposes. Let us examine them one at a time.

How best �to promote conservative ideals within the vehicle of the Republican Party?� If you want to get inside �the vehicle of the Republican Party,� you have to open its door, so to speak, and climb in. The door you have to open is your local committee meeting door � that is where you�ll learn how to become a voting member of the Party, a precinct committeeman. At those meetings, and during the leadership elections, where you�ll be able to vote for the Party leader candidates (only precinct committeemen get to do this), you�ll be best able to �promote conservative ideals within the vehicle of the Republican Party�

How best �to clean house in the Republican Party?� Become a Republican Party member, because you aren�t really �in� the Republican Party until you become a voting member of it.

How best �to help elect conservative Republicans?� Become a Republican Party precinct committeeman, so you can help get out the vote in the all-important, traditionally-very-low-turnout primary elections for the conservative Republican candidates.

But you better hurry. Because in some states, the deadlines have already passed for becoming a voting member of the Party during the upcoming 2012 election cycle.

Thank you.

For Liberty,

ColdWarrior

—————-
Will YOU help make 2011 “The Year of the Precinct Committeeman?”

Where it all started.

Learn how to GOTV at The Concord Project and at Procinct and Unified Patriots.

Endgame in Wisconsin

noreply@blogger.com (Norman C Hoffmann) — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 17:13:00 +0000

The state senate moves boldly against collective bargaining.

After an exhausting three-week stalemate, Wisconsin Republicans maneuvered late Wednesday to curb collective bargaining for public-sector workers, passing an amended budget-repair bill by an 18–1 vote in the state senate. The surprise legislative gambit stunned labor activists, who have flocked to Madison in recent weeks, and stymied the 14 Democratic state senators who fled to Illinois on February 17 in protest of Gov. Scott Walker’s budget proposal.

“The Senate Democrats have had three weeks to debate this bill and were offered repeated opportunities to come home, which they refused,” Walker said following the vote, which occurred on short notice in the early evening. He hailed the effort as a necessary step toward closing the state’s $3.6 billion budget deficit.

#ad#Until Wednesday, the Democrats’ absence had denied Republicans a quorum on Walker’s plan, which also includes reforms of pension and health-care contributions for state workers. But after negotiations between senate leaders stalled, Walker, according to sources, urged senate Republicans to move forward Wednesday during a closed-door meeting. With little debate, Republicans agreed to repackage the bill into a non-appropriation measure, setting off a series of legislative procedures that pushed the revamped bill to the floor within hours.

State senator Alberta Darling, the Republican chairman of the Joint Finance Committee, tells National Review Online that she and her colleagues held their ground even as the roars under the rotunda grew louder by the hour. “Governor Walker told us that he had tried to negotiate, but Democrats refused. We had to get the job done.” By moving the collective-bargaining section of his budget bill “off of the table,” Darling says, Walker hoped to bring the Democrats home, as soon as possible, to address other pressing fiscal matters.

With his colleagues’ backing, senate majority leader Scott Fitzgerald, a Republican, brought the bill into conference committee, where legislators pruned the plan’s fiscal elements during the late afternoon. Republicans kept the collective-bargaining provision as the bill’s keystone, but gutted language related to debt refinancing, for instance, therefore bypassing the state constitution’s quorum requirements for fiscal legislation.

In a bit of political theater, Rep. Peter Barca, the Democratic leader in the assembly, shouted at Fitzgerald as he initiated the mark-up, calling it a violation of the state’s open-meetings law. But the bill, to Barca’s vocal dismay, was stamped with the committee’s approval and hustled to the chamber. What remained, though similar to Walker’s original outline, required a simple majority. It easily passed at around 6 p.m., with one only one member of the 19-strong GOP caucus, moderate senator Dale Schultz, objecting.

Mayhem engulfed the state capitol following the vote. Thousands of protesters streamed into the four wings of the historic white-granite building, screaming at the GOP lawmakers, who were quickly escorted out by police. College students from the University of Wisconsin’s Madison campus mingled with union leaders, teachers raised fists with progressive organizers. Cries of “Shame!” echoed throughout the marble halls.

#page#Senate Republicans were harried by swarming crowds. “We tried to get out of the building after the vote, because they were rushing the chamber, and we were escorted by security through a tunnel system to another building. But, after being tipped off by a Democrat, they mobbed the exit at that building, and were literally trying to break the windows of the cars we were in as we were driving away,” Republican senator Randy Hopper tells NRO. Such tactics, he sighs, were hardly unexpected. “I got a phone call yesterday saying that we should be executed. I’ve had messages saying that they want to beat me with a billy club.”

#ad#Senate Democrats are expected to return to Madison on Thursday to tangle with Republicans as the bill heads to the state assembly, where Republicans hold a solid majority. Rep. Michelle Litjens, a GOP state representative, predicts that she and her colleagues will complete final passage. “Wisconsin needs this to be over,” she says. “We tried to negotiate and the senators never came back. We just have to get this done.”

Still, the fight could last days, especially if Democrats mount an all-out effort to filibuster via debate in the lower chamber. Outside groups are pitching in: Eight Republican senators are facing recall campaigns, and hordes of union members with signs and colorful T-shirts continue to arrive in Madison. On Wednesday night, jolted by the vote, irate Democrats already had their fists raised. “In 30 minutes, 18 state senators undid 50 years of civil rights in Wisconsin,” said Sen. Mark Miller, the Democratic leader, in an interview with the Associated Press. “Their disrespect for the people of Wisconsin and their rights is an outrage that will never be forgotten.”

Despite his misgivings, Miller acknowledges that Walker’s bill is now set to become law. “It’s a done deal,” he said. Republican Darling, however, remains worried about how the drama will unfold in Madison -- especially if the protesters continue to occupy, and nearly control, the state capitol. “It’s like we are in a foreign country or in Chicago during the 1920s and 1930s,” she says. “I have had death threats. I have had my home protected by our local police. That’s not the America I know.”

For now, state Republicans are optimistic. As the jeers increase and the recalls pick up speed, they are determined to pass Walker’s bill. “Look, from Day One, the [unions] have been threatening physical violence and political recalls,” Hopper says. “But it’s more important for us to do our jobs than keep our jobs. This is not something that we are going to run our next political campaign on. This is something that we are going to tell our grandchildren about, that we fixed the state for them.”

--- Robert Costa is a political reporter for National Review.

Robert Costa

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MUST WATCH Iranian Video:The 12th Imam is Near and Ahmadinejad is Going To Lead His Army

noreply@blogger.com (Norman C Hoffmann) — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 16:58:00 +0000

"We will soon see a new Middle East materialising without America and the Zionist regime and there will be no room for world arrogance (the West) in it," Ahmadinejad told the cheering crowds who gathered despite the cold and cloudy weather.

"They (the United States) have adopted a friendly face and saying 'we are friends of people of North Africa and Arab countries', but be watchful and united. You will be victorious," he said.

"The final move has begun. We are in the middle of a world revolution managed by this dear (12th Imam). A great awakening is unfolding. One can witness the hand of Imam in managing it," said Ahmadinejad.....

"Come and take away the Zionist regime which is the source of all crimes... take it away and liberate the region. Free the region and give it to the people and take this regime, which is the child of Satan (the United States), out."

"The Iranian nation and the Islamic Revolution have a pivotal role in preparing the ground for the coming of the Hidden Imam... We must rapidly develop Iran in order to create the [right] conditions for his coming, and we must also help the rest of the world's nations [to prepare for his return], in order to precipitate this great event...

Reconciled To Tim Pawlenty

noreply@blogger.com (Norman C Hoffmann) — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 13:34:00 +0000

As many of you may recall, I am not the biggest fan of Mitt Romney. Contra streiff, I don’t really expect Romney to be the last man standing in the 2012 primaries, even if they go relatively badly in terms of who gets in and who gets their act together once in. Romneycare, atop his many other defects, is too big a problem for too many voters.

But there is a candidate in the race who represents, to me, the lowest common denominator we can all learn to live with, and that’s Tim Pawlenty. Ramesh Ponnuru, whose opinion is never easily dismissed, makes the case for Pawlenty at length in the March 7, 2011 issue of National Review, and I urge you to read it.

As Ramesh notes, Pawlenty is pretty dull (check out the clips of him I collected in profiling him as a VP candidate in 2008), and runs the risk of coming off as insincere as Romney if he tries to cure that by trying to be someone or something he’s not. Not for nothing do I refer to Pawlenty as Governor Soggy Wonder Bread. In many ways he’s McCain without the interesting parts, for good and ill - minimally acceptable on all the big issues. And while that was a sad excuse for a candidate in 2008, it may be a very different story in 2012 if Obama is still unpopular and ends up banking entirely on his ability to discredit his opponent to win.

Fundamentally, Pawlenty is the one guy in the field with no potentially fatal weaknesses. He’s the most experienced candidate available - two terms as a blue-state governor and four years as a state house majority leader make him the rare presidential candidate experienced as a chief executive and a legislative leader. The media will try, but he can’t be effectively caricatured the way Palin, Barbour and Romney can. And like Romney, he has one crucial thing the rest of the field has yet to prove - he wants the job, badly, and is effectively already running.

I’m not trying to sell anybody just now on Pawlenty - as I’ll explain in a lengthier post on Palin I keep meaning to finish writing, I don’t think we should be committing ourselves to anybody in the field just yet, and I intend to keep hunting for a better alternative than Pawlenty. But we can most assuredly do worse, and if we’re stuck (as in 2008) with a last-man-standing least-of-evils anybody-but-Obama candidate, I think Pawlenty will prove to be a far more plausible choice than Romney or Huckabee or Jon Huntsman. I certainly want him to stick in the race so we have that option available.

So, just in case, save me a seat on the blandwagon.

What Should We Do About Libya?

noreply@blogger.com (Norman C Hoffmann) — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 13:11:00 +0000

Experts weigh in.

ELLIOTT ABRAMS
There are things we should do and things we should not do.

--- Elliott Abrams, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, was the deputy national security adviser on the Middle East in the George W. Bush administration.

The world will continue to look to America for leadership. Any action, including use of force, must be designed to advance long-term strategic goals.

It is not yet clear how yesterday’s announcement fits in with these requirements.

--- Mackenzie Eaglen is a research fellow for national security at the Heritage Foundation.

--- Mohamed Eljahmi is a Libyan-American activist.

The president should fulfill the “moral obligation” he cited during his campaign in 2008 to intervene as quickly as possible to halt the bloodshed.

It’s time for the president to stop talking and take action.

--- Jamie M. Fly is executive director of the Foreign Policy Initiative.

--- John P. Hannah, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, served as national security adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney from 2005 to 2009.

America’s options are poor and limited, but we should not pass on the opportunity to display principled leadership.

#ad#First, America must take the lead by forcefully expressing support for American values. It is vital that the U.S. lead in promoting freedom, equality, and opportunity.

--- Pete Hoekstra is former congressman from Michigan.

--- Raymond Ibrahim is associate director of the Middle East Forum.

--- Joshua Muravchik, a fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, is the author of The Next Founders: Voices of Democracy in the Middle East.

--- David Pryce-Jones is a senior editor of NR.

--- Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

--- Benjamin Weinthal is a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

NRO Symposium

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