THERE IS NO SECOND PLACE

The 527 - Drive By Media doesn't mind outing CIA agents if they are fighting for freedom.

Source: ***Media Research Center CyberAlert***
   10:15am EST, Thursday February 22, 2007

"Where's the outrage?" So asked James Taranto in his Wednesday 
"Best of the Web Today" column for Opinion Journal.com. Taranto 
highlighted a Sunday Los Angeles Times story, "Pilots traced to 
CIA renditions: The Times identifies three fliers facing 
kidnapping charges in Germany related to a 2003 
counter-terrorism mission," which though it did not list their 
real names, identified the aliases and enough information about 
each to help anyone trying to find them, including how they all 
live within 30 miles of a certain rural airport. One "drives a 
Toyota Previa minivan and keeps a collection of model trains in 
a glass display case near a large bubbling aquarium in his 
living room," another "is a bearded man of 35 who lives with his 
father and two dogs in a separate subdivision" and a third "is 
46, drives a Ford Explorer and has a 17-foot aluminum fishing 
boat" where he lives "in a house that backs onto a private golf 
course here." (Taranto explained: "In a town of 13,000 the Times 
identifies in its dateline.")

    Taranto ruminated: "Remember all the outrage when Robert 
Novak 'outed' Valerie Plame, who apparently worked a desk job 
at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va.? Here the L.A. Times is 
publishing extensive personal details on three men who have 
actually done dangerous work defending the country. Where's 
the outrage?" Good question.

    The February 21 "Best of the Web Today" compilation: 
http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110009695

    [This item was posted Wednesday afternoon on the MRC's 
blog, NewsBusters.org: http://newsbusters.org/node/10974 ]

    An excerpt from the February 18 Los Angeles Times story 
by Bob Drogin and John Goetz:

...The names they used were all aliases, but The Times 
confirmed their real identities from government databases 
and visited their homes this month after a German court in 
January ordered the arrest of the three "ghost pilots" and 
10 other alleged members of the CIA's special renditions unit 
on charges of kidnapping and causing serious bodily harm 
to Khaled Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent, three 
years ago.

None of the pilots responded to repeated requests for comment 
left with family members and on their home telephones. The 
Times is not publishing their real names because they have 
been charged only under their aliases....
	
According to Masri's account, he was detained by local 
authorities while crossing from Serbia into Macedonia on 
Dec. 31, 2003. Three weeks later, seven or eight men in masks 
stripped him naked, put him in a diaper and jumpsuit, drugged 
him and then chained him, spread-eagle and blindfolded, to the 
floor of a Boeing 737 that flew to Afghanistan on Jan. 24, 2004. 
German prosecutors say the men in masks were with the CIA 
rendition team.

At the time, U.S. intelligence authorities believed Masri 
was involved with radical Islamic groups in Ulm, a city in 
southern Germany. Masri was released five months later after 
undergoing what he described as repeated beatings and other 
physical abuse in a now-closed CIA-run prison called the Salt 
Pit in Kabul, the Afghan capital. U.S. officials have told
German authorities that Masri was seized and imprisoned in 
error because his name is similar to that of a suspected 
terrorist linked to Al Qaeda.

Flight records show that Aero Contractors, based in Smithfield, 
N.C., operated the plane that carried Masri from Macedonia to 
Afghanistan. The charter aircraft company has flown scores of 
sensitive missions for the CIA and has played a key support 
role in counter-terrorism operations since the Sept. 11 
attacks, according to former agency officials.

The three pilots in the Masri rendition case live within a 
30-minute drive of the guarded Aero hangar and offices at 
the rural Johnston County airport. Reached by telephone 
Saturday, Aero official Freddy Pearce declined to discuss 
any aspect of the company's business.

The chief pilot in the Masri case, who used the alias Fairing,
called Pearce at his Clayton home during his layover in Spain.

In real life, the chief pilot is 52, drives a Toyota Previa 
minivan and keeps a collection of model trains in a glass 
display case near a large bubbling aquarium in his living room. 
Federal aviation records show he is rated to fly seven kinds 
of aircraft as long as he wears his glasses.

His wife, reached by phone at her office, said her husband 
had done no wrong. "He's just a pilot," she said.

His copilot, who used the alias Fain, is a bearded man of 
35 who lives with his father and two dogs in a separate 
subdivision. He called home during a subsequent mission 
from the Royal Plaza Hotel on the Spanish resort island of 
Ibiza, according to records collected by Spanish 
investigators from the Guardia Civil.

The third pilot, who used the alias Bird, is 46, drives a 
Ford Explorer and has a 17-foot aluminum fishing boat. 
Certified as a flight instructor, he keeps plastic models 
of his favorite planes mounted by the fireplace in his 
living room in a house that backs onto a private golf 
course here. His wife declined to comment....

    END of Excerpt

    For the February 18 Los Angeles Times article in full:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-
pilots18feb18,1,3175908.stor
y?ctrack=1&cset=true

Dem's are all about tax increases.

WASHINGTON -- Virtually all the Democratic presidential contenders say they will raise taxes only on the richest Americans, but the truth is, their tax increases will likely hit people further down the income scale.

Democrats supposedly learned their lesson when former vice president Walter Mondale barely carried only one state (his own) in his ill-fated 1984 presidential campaign, after he proposed tax hikes on annual incomes of more than $60,000. Now Democrats insist they would raise taxes on people earning $200,000 a year and up.

   

       
                    
        Democratic presidential hopefuls, U.S. Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del. right, greets former Iowa governor and presidential hopeful Tom Vilsack, Saturday, Feb. 17, 2007, before the Scott County Democrats' Red,White and Blue Dinner in Davenport, Iowa. (AP Photo/Matthew Holst)

   

Related Audio:

Presidential Platform

       

But middle-class voters have reasons to be skeptical of such promises that they or their employers would be untouched, because tax hikes on the top brackets always have unintended consequences that affect people in the lower tax brackets.

If the Democrats campaign on raising taxes just for those at the top tax rate (now 35 percent under the Bush tax cuts), "it will backfire on them for two reasons," said economic strategist Cesar Conda, who was Vice President Dick Cheney's chief domestic policy adviser.

"No. 1, a lot of small businesses, small proprietorships pay the top individual tax rate, so they will be raising taxes on small businesses and entrepreneurs," Conda said. While little businesses earning $200,000 or more a year sounds like a lot to the Democrats, the people who run them and perhaps employ others hardly consider themselves rich.

"No. 2, a lot of polls I've seen suggest the American people don't believe the Democratic tax increases will stop at just the rich, that eventually it will hit the middle class," he said.

Tax-cut crusader Grover Norquist has said how that would be done. "When they talk about taxing the oil companies, that would be a tax on anybody's 401(k) retirement plan that invests in Exxon-Mobil stock," he said. Half of all Americans are invested in the stock market, and tens of millions of these workers are middle class.

Even cautious Democrats are warning their presidential candidates to be careful about how they define the tax issue, fearing it could hurt their party's chances in 2008.

"The preconceptions about the Democrats is that they are more likely to raise taxes than the Republicans, so you have to be careful," said James Kessler, issues director for the Third Way, a centrist-leaning Democratic advocacy organization here.

"Democrats have to define themselves as proponents in the battle for the middle class so that any tax increases they espouse, like rolling back part of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, should be used primarily for middle-class tax cuts," he said.

But with few exceptions, the Democratic candidates have railed against the Bush tax cuts in general without making any distinctions about the bulk of its across-the-board provisions that reduced taxes for middle-income Americans and those at the very bottom, too.

Worse, their campaign rhetoric hints broadly that their tax targets aren't just the rich. "Let's get back to shared sacrifice," Sen. Hillary Clinton said when she unveiled her tax-hike plan to deal with Hurricane Katrina. "We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good," she told a San Francisco audience in 2004.

In his best-selling book, "The Audacity of Hope," Sen. Barack Obama fiercely attacked perceived wage stagnation and income inequality. Bush's tax cuts "made them worse," he said, and he was going to do something about that by raising taxes.

In fact, millions of very low income Americans were removed from the tax rolls by Bush's tax cuts, while millions more were put in a new and lower 10 percent tax bracket. How exactly did this make them worse? Former North Carolina senator John Edwards has proposed soaking the rich to finance universal health care, but more sober estimates suggest he would need to target people much further down the income scale to pay for his enormously expensive government plan.

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson may be the only exception among the Democratic candidates calling for higher taxes. In his first term, he cut his state's income tax rates across the spectrum (as Bush did), cutting the top income tax rate from 8.2 percent to 4.9 percent.

It's not something he brags about before certain audiences. He never mentioned the tax cuts in his speech earlier this month to the Democratic National Committee's winter meeting where they cheered Clinton's call for seizing oil-company profits and spending it on the environment and other programs.

In their zealous pursuit of higher taxes, Clinton, Edwards, Obama et al. suggest the rich are not paying their fair share, when in fact they are paying the lion's share.

The top 10 percent of all income earners were paying 67.7 percent of all federal income taxes paid in 2001 when Bush enacted his tax cuts. By 2004, they were paying nearly 71 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office and the IRS.

If the Democrats' presidential pack thinks that's not high enough, then they're coming after the rest of us.

Comments from Alan Caruba a Reagan conservative who writes for The National Anxiety Center.

I posted an article by Alan Caruba it was very insightful.  I suggest that you read it.  It's called The Trouble with Peace posted on Feb 15, 2007. 
You can also look at http://www.anxietycenter.com/warning/v9n7.htm

I sent Alan my New Contract With America the following is his reply.

Andy: I am a Reagan conservative, a pragmatist who thinks conservative values and principles have proven their value.

 

"I also have what I call the New Contract With America.  Could you give me some thoughts on what you think about these suggestions. As a Conservative Republican these are the issues that I think we need to focus on."

1.  Aggressively pursue the war on terrorism. (This is going to be a decades-long war or, to be more precise, a series of firefights in far-flung places.)

2.  Nominate and confirm judges that will follow the constitution. (Can't disagree with this. The Constitution has been stretched beyond recognition.)

3.  Close the borders and enforce the immigration laws. (From a purely demographic point of view, this is necessary to stabilize the population and catch up with the improvements of the infrastructure to support it.)

4.  Repeal Article XVI of the Constitution and implement the Fair Tax. (I don't know enough about taxes to comment, but an across the boards tax seems a good idea.)

5.    Vote for real cuts in spending, eliminate corporate welfare, be fiscally conservative. (We are way over-extended with the spending our government does. I am less sure about "corporate welfare" as anything that helps corporations generally helps the economy in terms of jobs, trade, etc.)

6.  Reform Social Security.  Privatize. (Yes, I would privatize it. This is pure socialism.)

7.  Reform Medicare and Medicaid.  deregulate (Another huge government program)

8.  Reform the education system with vouchers. (Government should get out of education at the federal level. It has helped to ruin a formerly excellent educational system. The teacher's unions, however, bear the most blame.)

9.  Continue to reform the welfare system to really help. (Okay)

10. Reform the drug laws.  By legalizing, taxing and regulating we will take revenue out of the hands of terrorist, relieve the burden on our justice system, free up jail space for terrorist. (I would legalize drug use, sales, and rehabilitation. Make it a supervised, open system. Americans spend some $40 billion on them, so why not let that money go to helping them stop when they want instead of warehousing these fools.)

11. Stop earmarks.  Make lobbyist transactions transparent. (Absolutely eliminate earmarks.)

 

Islam- I'm very impressed by Alan Caruba

Islam’s Lethal Certitude

By Alan Caruba (June 2006)

Americans and others in the West cannot comprehend why anyone would blow themselves up to kill, as often as not, other Muslims. Even if you were convinced that 72 virgins awaited you in paradise, committing suicide for the purpose of murder is so foreign to the Western mind that it remains, for most, outside the realm of any discussion.

Clearly, though, the West has witnessed and been victimized by a religion and culture for which this is a perfectly acceptable way to wage war and Islam is all about war, the conquering and reduction of an enemy to submission. The very word, Islam, translates as submission.

"Some Crusaders and Zionists, for example, doggedly accuse Islam of being the religion of the sword, claiming that it was spread by the edge of the sword," wrote Sayyid Qutb in "Basic Principles of the Islamic Worldview" before he was executed by the Egyptian government in 1966 as a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.

"These people forget that Islam, being the last divine path for humanity, has an essential right to establish its own system on earth so that all humanity can enjoy its blessings…Establishing the ‘Islamic system’ to have beneficial sway over all humanity, those who embrace Islam and those who do not, does indeed require Jihad as does the liberty of men to follow their own beliefs." Qutb is careful to nod in the direction of the Islamic admonition that "there is no compulsion in religion", but Islam is all about compulsion.

Qutb (1906-1966) was an Egyptian Islamist who wrote extensively about modern civilization and, with absolute certainty, the superiority of an Islamic theocracy to all other faiths and modes of governing on earth. As such, he is widely regarded as the intellectual father of the Islamic revolution that has been in play since the late 1970s and of al Qaeda. His brother, Muhammad Qutb, moved to Saudi Arabia where he became a professor of Islamic Studies and one of his students, an ardent follower of Sayyid Qutb, was Ayman Zawahiri, the mentor of Osama bin Laden.

Thus, we can begin to connect the dots of a religion that fosters a certitude and arrogance that the Western mind cannot comprehend. It is necessary to understand, however, that Islam arrived more than 2,500 years after the existence of Judaism, and 700 years after the spread of Christianity. It was the invention of Muhammad, based on his own spotty knowledge of these earlier religions and, like Muhammad, Qutb’s regard for both is one of utter contempt.

"Judaism," wrote Qutb, "the religion of the Children of Israel, was polluted with pagan concepts as well as racial arrogance." Well, so much for the first and oldest monotheistic religion. Modern day Muslims are so befuddled by, not only the continued existence of Judaism, but the fact that Jews have reestablished the nation of Israel, they have waged a relentless effort to exterminate Israel’s Jews.

"Christianity was no better than Judaism," wrote Qutb. "It was even worse." Hinduism is dismissed in a paragraph or two and Buddhism isn’t even mentioned. Well, so much for tolerance! Despite the superficial effort to reflect some regard for the prophets that preceded Muhammad, Qutb’s view is that "Islam has served as a correction to all the chaos and confusion, to all the deviations and faults into which all the distorted religions and clashing philosophies have blindly fallen, whether before or after the emergence of Islam."

By Qutb’s standard, anything anyone believes that is not Islamic is just confusion and deviation. The extraordinary thing about Qutb’s belief is that he clearly possessed a keen intellect. Well schooled in Islam, as a youth he moved to Cairo where he received a Western education between 1929 and 1933 before starting a career as a teacher. The turning point, ironically, was a trip Qutb took to the United States from 1948 to 1950 on a scholarship. He received a master’s degree from the Colorado State College of Education.

His contact with the West radicalized Qutb because, as far as anyone can tell, he was not merely an ascetic, but a celibate who found normal human desires and behavior deeply offensive. He never married. Just about everything in those years of American rejuvenation after WWII was an abomination to Qutb who took time to write his first theoretical work of religious criticism which was published in 1949. Writing about America he pronounced life there as "primitive" and endlessly shocking.

Clearly, he retreated into Islam as a defense against the real world and, in particular, the dynamic world of the West. The Middle East had been in decline for hundreds of years by then after its so-called golden years of conquest and expansion. Driven from Europe by 878 C.E., suffering the Crusades from 1095 to 1291, and fading under the Ottoman Empire, the Muslims of that region were locked in ignorance, poverty and oppression.

Anything modern, anything secular, including the rise of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, the leading proponent of Arab nationalism, was an anathema to Qutb. He was not ignorant of the West, but he was utterly contemptuous of it. Despite his having read widely of Western philosophers and, apparently, science and other topics reflecting the long road to modernity made since the Enlightenment, the only truth to be found anywhere, so far as Qutb was concerned, was in the Koran.

"First and foremost," wrote Qutb, "the verses of the Koran were revealed in order to establish the correct criteria on which God wishes the concepts of humans as well as their life to be based." Everything that preceded the Koran was the "accumulated debris; beliefs, concepts, philosophies, myths, thoughts, doubts, superstitions, customs and traditions."

Prior to Islam, humans were "unable to find certitude." 

The one thing Islam does provide to those born into it and to those who convert to Islam is certitude. And with certitude comes the human affliction of an arrogant belief that no other religion or form of government other than that imposed by Islamic law has any right to exist. The punishment for leaving Islam is death. The enemies of Islam are to be beheaded.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you al Qaeda, Wahhabism, and the Islamic revolution that is your obligation to resist for the sake of all mankind.

 

The teachers unions ruined the educational system, vouchers could save it.

Robbing Parents to Pay Teachers

September 2006
By Alan Caruba

It is an act of thievery to take money to provide goods or services and then fail to do so. Our nation’s schools have become a great criminal conspiracy, promising to educate our children, but more often producing “graduates” without even the most basic skills, let alone a useful, wider body of knowledge.

“My daughter is now 20 years old,” one mother wrote to me recently. “After graduating from high school in June 2005, she enrolled at the local community college. It was necessary for her to take a placement test and it was determined she needed to take Basic Skills Math and English before she could take [college level courses.] After failing both classes twice, she will not be returning. It breaks my heart to see that she can’t pass basic math or English class. How did she graduate high school?”

The answer is that her parents were heavily levied with property taxes, the vast portion of which was then given to the local school system to pay teachers and administrators salaries, along with all the other costs of operation. They, in turn, passed her daughter along, unmindful and indifferent to whether she learned anything. “She has been robbed of a basic education and we have been robbed of our tax dollars for 19 years.”

Early in his first term, President Bush embraced the “No Child Left Behind” legislation that has since been found wanting for its one-size-fits-all approach to education, its over-emphasis on testing, and its punishment of “under-performing” schools. The result has been to expose most schools as inadequate and to encourage every form of administrative cheating necessary for a school to meet the standards set by the law.

The idea was to force some improvement on a system everyone already knew was failing students. Laws, however, do not educate students. Teachers are expected to do that and it is no surprise that the National Education Association—a union—hated the idea of improvement. Indeed, from the 1960s to the present day, the NEA has done its best to undermine, if not destroy, a system of education that served previous generations of Americans quite well.

In the July/August edition of The American Enterprise, Jay Greene, wrote “Education Myths: Debunking the fictions that obstruct school reform.” The article was based on Greene’s book of the same name. Here are just a few examples of how schools rob parents to pay teachers who are producing students deliberately rendered ignorant.

The standard answer to any question about the quality of our schools is the demand for more funding. The truth, however, is that “spending per student has been growing steadily for 50 years.” It has doubled and then doubled again. What did not occur, however, was any significant improvement in test scores, particularly since the introduction in the 1970s of the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Okay, we may be spending more on schools, but isn’t it true that teachers still aren’t paid enough? No, if the poorly educated students they produce are the standard, they are vastly over-paid. “The average teacher’s salary does seem modest at first glace”, wrote Greene, “about $44,600 in 2002 for all teachers.” However, teachers only work nine months a year. A nurse making the same salary works twelve months with two week’s vacation and perhaps ten paid holidays. The statistics are damning evidence they are paid well for far less actual work than comparable jobs.

Another favorite myth is “that schools are helpless in the face of social problems is not supported by hard evidence,” wrote Greene. “The truth is that certain schools do a strikingly better job than others at overcoming challenges in the culture.” There is a reason why parents clamor for school choice, vouchers, when they know that some schools do a better job. Competition and incentives for the better schools would raise the standards for all schools.

Class size is yet another myth. Greene notes, “Research suggests there may be some advantages to smaller classes—though, if so, the benefits are modest and come at a very high price tag.” There is ample evidence that reducing class sizes is costly to the point of taking money from the purchase of books, equipment, and other reforms that would benefit students.

In most professions and trade, certification is regarded as a reliable sign that practitioners have demonstrated a reasonable level of expertise. “One of the strongest and most consistent findings in the entire body of research on teacher quality is that teaching certificates and master’s degrees in education are irrelevant to classroom performance.”

When the teacher corps is drawn from those college graduates who enter the profession for a lack of aptitude that would give them access to other, presumably better paying jobs, you end up with classrooms filled with people who may know barely more than their students. Or worse, are teaching classes on subjects for which they have no real skill, nor knowledge.

“According to the U.S. Department of Education, the average private school charged $4,689 per student in tuition for the 1999-2000 school years. That same year, the average public school spent $8,032 per pupil.” Somehow, private schools are able to out-perform public schools when it comes to imparting knowledge and skills despite the fact their students have less than half as much funding as public school students and the success of home-schooled students over their contemporaries is already legendary.

The entire education establishment, frequently advocating the teaching of values at odds with those held by parents, has ruined our nation’s schools and are defrauding taxpayers by failing to truly educate the children placed in their care.

How's the War Going? - Europe

Left Allows Europe to Fall to Muslims

by Rabbi Aryeh Spero  (More by this author)

Posted: 02/08/2007

In a recent interview, Prof. Bernard Lewis, famed historian and leading expert on Islam, warned that "Muslims seem to be about to take over Europe." The irony is that this takeover -- be it in 10 years or 30 -- is not because Islam has more tanks or better missiles than the Europeans. It is because the minority Islamic populations already living within Europe are making demands to Islamize Europe and no one seems to be willing to say no. No one has the political will to announce to the Islamic communities that daily life and laws in Europe must be in accord with the Western outlook that is Europe's heritage.

Was the fall of Europe inevitable? No, according to Prof. Lewis, who says it is coming about because "Europeans have surrendered on every issue regarding Islamic demands, due to political correctness and multi-culturalism." Europe has become woefully secular and its tepid attachment to a forgotten and dismissed Christianity is no match for the zeal of Muslims who remain fervent believers in their faith. Having been force fed that all cultures are equally valid, Europeans consider it unenlightened to assert the primacy of their culture even in their own countries.

What is even stranger is that secularized and politically correct European elites do insist on the primacy of indigenous cultures and religions when speaking of other faraway regions, yet find such insistence arrogant when it concerns the indigenous culture of its own lands. In other words, other countries are there to preserve their own way of life while the West is supposed to jello-ize and even deny its historic way of life. The bottom line: "Europeans have no respect for their own culture." Their worship of open-mindedness, no matter the cost, is leading to their demise. Perhaps for the first time in history, we are witnessing the death of a civilization not due to outside forces stronger militarily but because "instead of fighting the threat, Europeans have simply given up, and do not want to fight." Pacifism in Europe runs so deep that it goes beyond a reluctance to take up military arms and extends to not even battling verbally, be it with laws or assertive opinion, or by fighting for Western culture even in routine social conversations.

As is well known, after World War II, Europe began denigrating the concept of nationalism, and the further left it became politically, the further it extolled transnationalism. Brainwashing citizens against the natural human inclination to be proud and loyal to one's own country over others has boomeranged to the point where Europeans can no longer even make the case for their own culture and history.

The lesson for the United States is clear. So as not to fall and disintegrate as is Europe, we need strong national patriotism, a genuine belief in the West's Judeo-Christian heritage and religion, and a conviction that our inherited culture and civilization is best for us and has been the true source of our blessings, success and freedom. Bereft of these deep and abiding associations, what is there to fight for?

Moreover, it is necessary to assert that our historic ethos is superior to that which Islam is demanding. Europe, as well as history, shows that those unable to assert the primacy of their own culture at home are unwilling to even assert its parity, and mire in "suicidal self-abasement."

This self-abasement has gone so far that "sophisticated" Europeans extend respect and "understanding" to Islamic marital habits that they’d condemn if practiced by their own. They would never accept rampaging and burnings in response to cartoon publications and statements if done by fellow Englishmen. Nor would they countenance censorship of the press if a bishop was offended by some newspaper article.

Yet out of a strange deference and submission to things Islamic, many are accepting that which they would condemn if perpetrated by a native Christian Brit. In other words, Islamic "honor" is more important than British honor, and Islamic habits are given more deference than Western customs and mores continually under self- assault and self-criticism. Criticism is reserved only for our culture, the "bad, discredited, and passé Western culture."

What brought Europe to this pitiful surrender is the left/liberalism that has controlled it since the 1960s. This post-modern liberalism has used political correctness and multi-culturalism to strip Europe of that which had previously made it great, and worthwhile. If it has proven a disastrous recipe for Europe, it certainly is no prescription for us in America. It is a cultural poison, a death potion. We, therefore, must not allow the elitist left to do here what they've already done to Europe. We know, however, that is precisely what the American Left is trying to do, and we see how the elitists in this country always ape Europe, demanding that "we Americans act more European-like."

To be sure, some in Europe accede to the demands of Islam over European life not out of a sense of cultural inferiority but fear, palpable fear. But the question remains: Given that the Islamists living inside Europe are not armed with tanks or other heavy military equipment, why can't the better equipped police forces subdue the Islamic gangs and imams that are intimidating the British and European public? Why can't law enforcement shut down the Islamic hot heads and centers that are creating such fear among Europeans that they’d rather forfeit actual civil liberties (freedom of speech), their culture, and way of life so as to appease the threatening Islamists?

Because political correctness has tied the hands of those entrusted to protect the home-grown citizenry. The courts and the ruling elites in charge of European legal institutions have made it almost impossible to enforce the laws and protect the people. New operational terms, such as racial profiling, cultural understanding, mosque sanctuary, community deference, etc., have been sanctified so that Moslems are exempt from the very tough investigatory and law enforcement procedures normally used when trying to apprehend other criminals and violators of the law. Sociology is replacing strength and common sense.

Worse, the blood-curdling threats by imams against the public go unpunished while candid and forthright apprehensions over what the Islamic community is doing to society is punishable as a hate crime.

Out of fear, Europe is appeasing. It has become a supplicant. Out of guilt, Europe is acquiescing. Out of years of self-criticism, it no longer feels worthy. Cynicism has lead to defeatism. Pacifisim has replaced religion. They believed in the parity of everything, so they now believe in nothing -- not even themselves. They, not the enemy, are orchestrating their own national demise.

To those elites in Europe, and America, who feel a greater kinship with the exotic peoples of other cultures than with the dull citizens of their own country, there is nothing to fear. For what will have been lost is something, a set of cultural beliefs, they discarded long ago; nationalisms that were objects of scorn and had, for them, become boring. An Islamized Europe is nothing to fret and worry over. Wrong!

Prof. Lewis warns: "The growing sway in Europe is of particular concern given the ever-rising support within the Islamic world for extremist and terrorist movements." But these self-righteous, self-centered elitists born of the 60s Left still need not worry. They probably will not be the victims of the annihilation they have wrought. It will be their children and grandchildren.

Russia - We have to watch these guys. And China.

Does Putin Not Have a Point?

by Patrick J. Buchanan  (More by this author)

Posted: 02/13/2007

"A soft answer turneth away wrath," teaches Proverbs 1:15.

Our new secretary of defense, Roberts Gates, seems familiar with the verse. For his handling of Saturday's wintry blast from Vladimir Putin at the Munich security conference was masterful.

"As an old Cold Warrior, one of yesterday's speeches almost filled me with nostalgia for a less complex time," said Gates, adding, "Almost." A former director of the CIA, Gates went on to identify with Putin: "I have, like your second speaker yesterday ... a career in the spy business. And I guess old spies have a habit of blunt speaking.

"However, I have been to re-education camp, spending the last four-and-a-half years as a university president and dealing with faculty. And as more than a few university presidents have learned in recent years, when it comes to faculty it is either 'be nice' or 'be gone.'"

Gates added he would be going to Moscow to talk with the old KGB hand, who will be retiring as Russia's president around the time President Bush goes home to Crawford. Excellent.

For one of the historic blunders of this administration has been to antagonize and alienate Russia, the winning of whose friendship was a signal achievement of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. And one of the foreign policy imperatives of this nation is for statesmanship to repair the damage.

What did we do to antagonize Russia?

When the Cold War ended, we seized upon our "unipolar moment" as the lone superpower to seek geopolitical advantage at Russia's expense.

Though the Red Army had picked up and gone home from Eastern Europe voluntarily, and Moscow felt it had an understanding we would not move NATO eastward, we exploited our moment. Not only did we bring Poland into NATO, we brought in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, and virtually the whole Warsaw Pact, planting NATO right on Mother Russia's front porch. Now, there is a scheme afoot to bring in Ukraine and Georgia in the Caucasus, the birthplace of Stalin.

Second, America backed a pipeline to deliver Caspian Sea oil from Azerbaijan through Georgia to Turkey, to bypass Russia.

Third, though Putin gave us a green light to use bases in the old Soviet republics for the liberation of Afghanistan, we now seem hell-bent on making those bases in Central Asia permanent.

Fourth, though Bush sold missile defense as directed at rogue states like North Korea, we now learn we are going to put anti-missile systems into Eastern Europe. And against whom are they directed?

Fifth, through the National Endowment for Democracy, its GOP and Democratic auxiliaries, and tax-exempt think tanks, foundations and "human rights" institutes such as Freedom House, headed by ex-CIA director James Woolsey, we have been fomenting regime change in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet republics and Russia herself.

U.S.-backed revolutions have succeeded in Serbia, Ukraine and Georgia, but failed in Belarus. Moscow has now legislated restrictions on the foreign agencies that it sees, not without justification, as subversive of pro-Moscow regimes.

Sixth, America conducted 78 days of bombing of Serbia for the crime of fighting to hold on to her rebellious province, Kosovo, and for refusing to grant NATO marching rights through her territory to take over that province. Mother Russia has always had a maternal interest in the Orthodox states of the Balkans.

These are Putin's grievances. Does he not have a small point?

Joe Lieberman denounced Putin's "Cold War rhetoric." But have we not been taking what cannot unfairly be labeled Cold War actions?

How would we react if China today brought Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela into a military alliance, convinced Mexico to sell oil to Beijing and bypass the United States, and began meddling in the affairs of Central America and Caribbean countries to effect the electoral defeat of regimes friendly to the United States? How would we react to a Russian move to put anti-missile missiles on Greenland?

Gates says we have been through one Cold War and do not want another. But it is not Moscow moving a military alliance right up to our borders or building bases and planting anti-missile systems in our front and back yards.

Why are we doing this? This country is not going to go to war with Russia over Estonia. With our Army "breaking" from two insurgencies, how would we fight? By bombing Moscow and St. Petersburg?

Just as we deluded ourselves into believing this war would be a "cakewalk," that democracy would break out across the Middle East, that we would be beloved in Baghdad, so America today has undertaken commitments, dating to the Cold War and since, we do not remotely have the resources or will to fulfill. We are living in a world of self-delusion.

Somewhere in this presidential campaign, someone has to bring us back to earth. The halcyon days of American Empire are over.

How's the War Going - Iran - Policical calculus

Tapping Ahmadinejad's egg
By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, February 15, 2007

We all know the Iranian M.O. — nuclear proliferation, Holocaust denial, threats to wipe out Israel, vicious anti-Western rhetoric, lavish sponsorship of terrorists at work attacking Israel and destabilizing Lebanon.

If that were not enough, we now learn that Iran has been sending agents into Iraq to destroy the fledgling democracy and supplying sophisticated roadside bombs to blow up Americans.

   

       
                    
        Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, deliver his speech to propose his new Justice Minister, in an open session of parliament in Tehran, Iran, Tuesday, Feb. 13, 2007. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)

           

Lunatic state-run media keep boasting that Iran will kidnap American soldiers, shut down the Straits of Hormuz, send out global jihadists and raise the price of oil.

Most international observers agree on two things about this loony theocracy that promises to take the world down with it: We should not yet bomb Iran, and it should not get the bomb. Yet the former forbearance could well ensure the latter reality.

What, then, should the United States do other than keep offering meaningless platitudes about "dialogue" and "talking"?

Imagine that Iran is a hardboiled egg with a thin shell. We should tap it lightly wherever we can — until tiny fissures join and shatter the shell.

We can begin to do this by pushing international accords and doggedly ratcheting up the weak United Nations sanctions. Even if they don't do much to Iran in any significant way, the resolutions seem to enrage Ahmadinejad. And when he rages at the United Nations, he only loses further support, especially in the Third World.

We should start another fissure by prodding the European Union, presently Iran's chief trading partner, to be more vocal and resolute in pressuring Iran. The so-called EU3 — Britain, France and Germany — failed completely to stop Iran's nuclear proliferation. But out of that setback came a growing realization among Europeans that a nuclear-tipped missile from theocratic Iran could soon hit Europe just as easily as it could Israel. Now Europeans should adopt a complete trade embargo to prevent Iranian access to precision machinery and high technology otherwise unobtainable from mischievous Russia and China.

Americans should continue to support Iranian dissidents. We need not encourage dissidents to go into the street, where they could be shot. Instead we can offer them media help and access to the West. Americans can highlight the plight of women, minorities and liberals in Iran — just the groups that so appeal to the elite Western left.

And we should announce in advance that we don't want any bases in Iran, that we don't want its oil, and that we won't send American infantry there. That would preempt the tired charges of imperialism and colonialism.

The United States also must stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan. The last thing Iran wants is a democratic and prosperous Middle East surrounding its borders. The televised sight of Afghans, Iraqis, Kurds, Lebanese and Turks voting and speaking freely could galvanize Iranian popular opinion that in time might overwhelm the mullahs.

At the same time, we need to remind the Gulf monarchies that a nuclear Shiite theocracy is far more dangerous to them than either the United States or Israel — and that America's efforts to contain Iran depend on their own to rein in Wahhabis in Iraq.

We should say nothing much about the presence of two or three U.S. carrier groups in the Persian Gulf and Mediterranean. Iran will soon grasp on its own that the build-up of such forces might presage air strikes that the United States excels in — and not more ground fighting that the American public apparently won't any longer stomach.

We must continue to make clear that Israel is a sovereign nation with a perfect right to protect itself. Sixty years after the Holocaust, no Israeli prime minister will sit still idly while seventh-century theocrats grandstand about wiping out Israel.

Let's also keep our distance and moderate our rhetoric. There's no reason to frighten average Iranians — who may share our antipathy to their country's regime — or to make therapeutic pleas to talk with those leaders in bunkers whom we know are our enemies.

Finally, and most importantly, Americans must conserve energy, gasify coal, diversify fuels, drill more petroleum and invent new energy sources. Only that can collapse the world price of petroleum.

When oil is priced at $60 a barrel, Ahmadinejad is a charismatic Third World benefactor who throws cash to every thug who wants a roadside bomb or shouldered-fired missile — and has plenty of money to buy Pakistani, North Korean or Russian nuclear components. But when oil is $30 a barrel, Ahmadinejad will be despised by his own masses, who will become enraged as state-subsidized food and gas skyrocket, and scarce Iranian petrodollars are wasted on Hezbollah and Hamas.

None of these taps alone will fracture Iran and stop it from going nuclear. But all of them together might well crack Ahmadinejad's thin shell before he gets the bomb.

So let's start tapping.

Newt. I'm not the only one talking about Newt any more.

                                                        

Here comes Newt
By Dick Morris and  Eileen McGann
Thursday, February 15, 2007

To echo the famous Negro League pitcher Satchel Paige: “Don’t look back, Newt Gingrich might be gaining on you.” Newt, consigned by many observers to Elizabeth Dole or Dan Quayle status in this GOP nominating process, appears to be moving up into contention, overtaking former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and battling to be the conservative alternative to either former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani or Arizona Sen. John McCain.

To grasp what’s happening, don’t think of states like New Hampshire or Iowa or worry whether it’s too early or too late. The key to following the Republican presidential nominating process this year is to recognize its essential similarity to the tennis’s U.S. Open at Forest Hills. There are quarter-finals, semi-finals, and finals.

   

       
                    
        Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich speaks at the GOP Christmas dinner dance in Manchester, N.H., Friday, Dec. 15, 2006. (AP Photo/Cheryl Senter)

           

In the quarter-finals, the center and the right each sort out the nominees to choose their candidate. On center court, Giuliani seems to be gaining a decisive lead over McCain’s impoverished presidential campaign. But on the right-hand court, unnoticed by most pundits, Gingrich seems to be building a lead over Romney and a host of conservative wannabes. The ultimate winner of the Giuliani/McCain quarter-final will face the winner of the Gingrich/Romney match-up in the semi-finals.

As McCain drops in the polls — he’s down to 22 percent while Rudy is up at 34 percent in the latest Fox News poll — some conservatives seem eager for a “real Republican” to challenge for the nomination. Their first choice, former Virginia Sen. George Allen, lies a-moldering in the grave and his runner-up, former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, has gone home to Tennessee.

Most observers assumed that Romney would fill the void. But he doesn’t seem to have been able to do so. It may be a racist refusal to vote for a Mormon or, more charitably, Romney’s flip-flop-flip from pro-life to pro-choice to pro-life, or it may have been his inconsistency on gay issues, but Mitt seems to be going the way of his father — out of contention. The Fox News poll, which recorded a surge to up to 8 percent of the GOP vote in its Dec. 5-6 tally, now has Romney dropping back to only 3 percent of the vote.

Enter Newt. Hungry for new ideas and desperate after losing Congress, Republican voters seem to be rallying to the only real genius in the race — the former Speaker. The statute of limitations seems to have expired on his personal scandals and Gingrich is striking a responsive chord among conservatives.

Fox News’s Jan. 30-31 survey had Newt leaving Romney way behind and challenging McCain for second place. The former Speaker’s vote share was 15 percent, giving him third place in the current standings.

Episodically, I just addressed a 450-person Lincoln Day dinner of the Lane County Republican Party in Eugene, Ore. A show of hands brought these results: Giuliani, 50 percent; Gingrich, 30 percent; McCain, 6 percent; Romney, 4 percent. A few days before, a speech to an Orlando investors group produced similar results.

But, as the slogan of the New York State Lottery goes: “You can’t win if you don’t play.” Newt’s current posture of waiting until the fall of 2007 to see how the process sorts itself out won’t work. The process abhors a vacuum. If Gingrich doesn’t move out to respond to the affection of the GOP base, one of the minor-leaguers — Huckabee, Brownback, Gilmore, Thompson, Hunter or Tancredo — will.

The irony of the GOP field at the moment is that while most Republicans are conservatives, the two frontrunners — Rudy and McCain — are moderates. And this isn’t Nelson Rockefeller’s Republican Party anymore! Gingrich is filling a real political need and if he moves out smartly and files his paperwork, takes his announcement bows, and journeys to Iowa and New Hampshire as a candidate, he might well be a contender.

The wall may have fallen. But the cold war may not be over.

                                                        

Russia steps back on the world stage
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, February 16, 2007

WASHINGTON -- Vladimir Putin -- Russia's president, although the more accurate title would be godfather -- made headlines last week with a speech in Munich that set a new standard in anti-Americanism. He not only charged the U.S. with the ``hyper-use of force,'' ``disdain for the basic principles of international law'' and having ``overstepped its national borders in ... the economic, political, cultural and educational policies it imposes on other nations.'' He even blamed the spread of weapons of mass destruction, which the U.S. has been combating with few allies and against constant Russian resistance, on American ``dominance'' that ``inevitably encourages'' other countries to defensively acquire them.

There is something amusing about criticism of the use of force by the man who turned Chechnya into a smoldering ruin; about the invocation of international law by the man who will not allow Scotland Yard to interrogate the polonium-soaked thugs it suspects of murdering Alexander Litvinenko, yet another Putin opponent to meet an untimely and unprosecuted death; about the bullying of other countries decried by a man who cuts off energy supplies to Ukraine, Georgia and Belarus in brazen acts of political and economic extortion.

   

       
                    
        Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, looks on during a wreath laying ceremony at the grave of late King Hussein in Amman, Jordan, Tuesday, Feb. 13, 2007. (AP Photo/ ITAR-TASS, Dmitry Astakhov, Presidential Press Service )

           

Less amusing is the greater meaning of Putin's Munich speech. It marks Russia's coming out. Flush with oil and gas revenues, the consolidation of dictatorial authority at home and the capitulation of both domestic and Western companies to his seizure of their assets, Putin issued his boldest declaration yet that post-Soviet Russia is preparing to reassert itself on the world stage.

Perhaps the most important line in his speech was the least noted because it seemed so innocuous. ``I very often hear appeals by our partners, including our European partners, to the effect that Russia should play an increasingly active role in world affairs,'' he said. ``It is hardly necessary to incite us to do so.''

Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko once boasted that no conflict anywhere on the globe could be settled without taking into account the attitude and interests of the Soviet Union. Gromyko's description of Soviet influence constitutes the best definition ever formulated of the term superpower.

And we know how Putin, who has called the demise of the Soviet Union the greatest political catastrophe of the 20th century, yearns for those superpower days. At Munich, he could not even disguise his Cold War nostalgia, asserting that ``global security'' in those days was ensured by the ``strategic potential of two superpowers.''

Putin's bitter complaint is that today there remains only one superpower, the behemoth that dominates a ``unipolar world." He knows that Moscow lacks the economic, military and even demographic means to challenge America as in Soviet days. He speaks more modestly of coalitions of aggrieved have-not countries that Russia might lead in countering American power.

Hence his increasingly active foreign policy -- military partnerships with China, nuclear cooperation with Iran, weapon supplies to Syria and Venezuela, diplomatic support as well as arms for a genocidal Sudan, friendly outreach to other potential partners of an anti-hegemonic (read: anti-American) alliance.

Is this a return to the Cold War? It is true that the ex-KGB agent occasionally lets slip a classic Marxist anachronism such as ``foreign capital'' (referring to Western oil companies) or the otherwise weird adjective ``vulgar'' (describing the actions of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which infuriated Putin by insisting upon a clean election in Ukraine). He even intimated that he might undo one of the unequivocal achievements of the late Cold War era, the so-called ``zero option'' agreement of 1987, and restore a Soviet-style medium-range ballistic missile force.

Nonetheless, Putin's aggressiveness does not signal a return to the Cold War. He is too clever to be burdened by the absurdity of socialist economics or Marxist politics. He is blissfully free of ideology, political philosophy and economic theory. There is no existential dispute with the United States.

He is a more modest man: a mere mafia don, seizing the economic resources and political power of a country for himself and his mostly KGB cronies. And promoting his vision of the Russian national interest -- assertive and expansionist -- by engaging in diplomacy that challenges the dominant power in order to boost his own.

He wants Gromyko's influence -- or at least some international acknowledgment that Moscow must be reckoned with -- without the ideological baggage. He does not want to bury us; he only wants to diminish us. It is 19th-century power politics at its most crude and elemental. Putin does not want us as an enemy. But at Munich he told the world that vis-a-vis America his Russia has gone from partner to adversary.