Very rare in a Leftist leader. Her speech to Congress in March was also notably warm. Her speech yesterday in Hawaii:
Ms Gillard paid tribute to America's war dead at a moving Veterans Day ceremony. The ceremony at Honolulu's picturesque Punchbowl Cemetery was Ms Gillard's first official engagement of her trip for APEC.
Just a few kilometres from the site of the infamous Pearl Harbor attack of World War 2, Ms Gillard was given a 19-gun salute as she arrived at the cemetery.
She told the crowd of veterans and their families it was a great privilege to be with them. "In this beautiful and hallowed American place where so many of America's own lie in graves which they found too soon you would be well entitled to say: They died for us. This is a day and a place for ourselves alone," she said.
"But we Australians know that this is not your way. "Because we know that so many of these buried here died for us too. "When we were under attack in the Pacific, so many of these buried here were among those who came to our aid. "They fought with us, together, side by side, step by bloody step."
It was US sailors during the Battle of the Coral Sea that eliminated Australia's fears of a Japanese invasion, she said. "It is a battle which is immortal in Australia," she said.
The importance the US places on Veterans Day says something about the country's peace-loving nature, she said. "It is not the anniversary of the onset of a great conflict. "Not the commemoration of a great victory or great feat of arms, it is the day and the hour of the end of the Great War.
"You remember your veterans in the moment to which each one of them dedicated their dearest hopes - you remember them at the moment when peace began."
Australia will never forget the sacrifices the US has made for peace, she said.
Ms Gillard and her partner Tim Mathieson then joined local luminaries and veterans in laying wreaths at the memorial.
SOURCE
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Obama's New Job Plan: Kill 400,000 Jobs Immediately
John Ransom
The decision by the Obama administration to delay any action on the XL Keystone pipeline until after the election is a fitting development for an administration that has pursued a bankrupt energy policy, a bankrupt jobs policy and is quite literally bankrupting the country with politics thinly veiled as policy.
And the beauty for Obama in this latest axe he's taken to jobs in the USA is that he doesn't even have consider Congress while he's swinging it. He can kill close to a half-a-million jobs all on his own.
“The State Department said Thursday it would take up to 18 months to review alternative routes for the Keystone expansion,” reports MarketWatch, “so it avoids carrying heavy Canadian crude past Nebraska's environmentally sensitive Sand Hills region and a major regional aquifer.”
The pipeline could ultimately supply about a million barrels of Canadian oil to the US per day and 400,000 US jobs, most of them almost immediately. But instead, the president, who has been railing against Congress for not passing another expensive jobs bill just killed 400,000 American jobs, while making sure the price of gas stays high for citizens.
And despite everything the Obama administration has done to slow down domestic development of oil and gas resources, the oil and gas sector is one of the fastest growing jobs markets in a very anemic job market. While other sectors are shedding jobs, oil and gas is hot.
“The six fastest-growing jobs for 2010-11,” according to Economic Modeling Specialists Inc’s (EMSI) latest quarterly employment data, “are related to oil and gas extraction. This includes service unit operators, derrick operators, rotary drill operators, and roustabouts. Each is expected to grow anywhere from 9% to 11% through this year, in an otherwise mostly stagnant economy.”
Imagine what would happen if we could get Obama to cooperate with creating jobs just a little bit.
The State Department had already issued an approval for the XL Keystone project back in August and it was just waiting on Obama’s desk for action.
Obama could have approved the pipeline easily on economic grounds- the project will create 20,000 construction jobs, plus another 350,000 ancillary jobs- but he’s being bullied by his friends on the left to stop the project in its tracks. The green meanies want him to put their anti-growth, anti-development, anti-job, misanthropic agenda above the welfare and prosperity of US citizens…again.
And he’s complied with them now temporarily, likely with the message that if they get him reelected, he’ll kill the project permanently.
Environmental whackos have been getting arrested by appointment at the White House for the last two months hoping to put pressure on Obama to scuttle the most significant development in energy for our country in the last 50 years.
If successful, the Keystone pipeline will not only significantly reduce US imports of oil from place like the Middle East and Latin America, but it will also help open up huge new oil resources in the United States by providing the confidence to develop oil reserves in the Rocky Mountain region.
While it’s estimated that Canada may have as much as 2 trillion barrels of oil in reserves, “the U.S. Geological Survey estimates the [US] has 4.3 trillion barrels of in-place oil shale resources centered in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, said Helen Hankins, Colorado director for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management” according to the Associated Press.
4.3 trillion barrels is 16 times the reserves of Saudi Arabia or enough oil to supply the US for 600 years.
But the newest delay has noting to do with aquifers in Nebraska; rather it has to do with activists on the left who want no fossil energy development under any circumstances. Obama thinks that if he alienates these activists, that he can forget about reelection. He’s already alienated the right and center. The only place he has to go is to the left.
The left doesn’t care about jobs. They only care about their agenda.
"The road to viability for the oil shale industry is reliant on a predictable regulatory structure and an environment in which companies can invest in research and development and create jobs," said Congressman Scott Tipton (R-CO), who has accused Obama of delaying the commercial extraction of shale oil by adding regulatory obstacles.
"The proper implementation of our environmental and safety regulations already on the books is a far better strategy than adding additional layers of bureaucracy to the process," said Tipton who held hearings on the subject in Colorado in the summer.
Earlier this summer the high priest of climate change, Nobel Prize winner, Al Gore blasted Obama for being timid on environmental matters, perhaps because he sensed a sell-out coming.
It will be a tough sell to the American people struggling under massive unemployment that the 400,000 jobs that could have been created by Keystone aren’t more important than the worries of environmentalists who think that a grouse has more value than a baby.
After all, the oil shipped through Keystone will replace oil that is being purchased from countries that don’t like us very much. And the project will add good paying, US jobs.
And this latest delay will undercut Obama’s demand that Congress pass his jobs bill “immediately,” a demand that started before the bill had even been written.
“The question, then, is, will Congress do something?" the president said at a press conference when he announced his jobs bull, but before he presented it to Congress.
"If Congress does something, then I can't run against a do-nothing Congress. If Congress does nothing, then it's not a matter of me running against them. I think the American people will run them out of town, because they are frustrated."
Frustrated? Yeah. Obama still doesn’t understand the half of it. It will be US Against Him until he’s out of office.
SOURCE
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With Friends Like These...
Caroline Glick
The slurs against Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu voiced by French President Nicolas Sarkozy and US President Barack Obama after last week's G20 summit were revealing as well as repugnant. Thinking no one other than Obama could hear him, Sarkozy attacked Netanyahu, saying, "I can't stand to see him anymore, he's a liar." Obama responded by whining, "You're fed up with him, but me, I have to deal with him every day."
These statements are interesting both for what they say about the two presidents' characters and for what they say about the way that Israel is perceived by the West more generally. To understand why this is the case it is necessary to first ask, when has Netanyahu ever lied to Sarkozy and Obama?
This week the UN International Atomic Energy Agency's report about Iran's nuclear weapons program made clear that Israel - Netanyahu included - has been telling the truth about Iran and its nuclear ambitions all along. In contrast, world leaders have been lying and burying their heads in the sand.
Since Iran's nuclear weapons program was first revealed to the public in 2004, Israel has provided in-depth intelligence information proving Iran's malign intentions to the likes of Sarkozy, Obama and the UN. And for seven years, the US government - Obama included - has claimed that it lacked definitive proof of Iran's intentions.
Obama wasted the first two years of his administration attempting to charm the Iranians out of their nuclear weapons program. He stubbornly ignored the piles of evidence presented to him by Israel that Iran was not interested in cutting a deal.
Perhaps Obama was relying on the US's 2007 National Intelligence Estimate about Iran's nuclear weapons program. As Israel said at the time, and as this week's IAEA report proves, it was the NIE - which claimed that Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003 - not Israel that deliberately lied about the status of Iran's nuclear weapons program. It was the US intelligence community that purposely deceived the American government and people about the gravest immediate threat to US national security.
Israel, including Netanyahu, was telling the truth. So if Netanyahu never lied about Iran, what might these two major world leaders think he lies about? Why don't they want to speak with him anymore? Could it be they don't like the way he is managing their beloved "peace process" with the Palestinians?
The fact is that the only times Netanyahu has spoken less than truthfully about the Palestinians were those instances when he sought to appease the likes of Obama and Sarkozy. Only when Netanyahu embraced the false claims of the likes of Obama and Sarkozy that it is possible to reach a peace deal with the Palestinians based on the establishment of an independent Palestinian state west of the Jordan River could it be said that he made false statements.
Because the truth is that Israel never had a chance of achieving peace with the Palestinians. And the reason this has always been the case has nothing to do with Netanyahu or Israel. THERE WAS never any chance for peace because the Palestinians have no interest in making peace with Israel.
As the West's favorite Palestinian "moderate," Fatah leader and Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas said in an interview with Egypt's Dream TV on October 23, "I've said it before and I'll say it again. I will never recognize the 'Jewishness' of the State [of Israel] or a 'Jewish state.'" That is, Abbas will never make peace with Israel.
Acknowledging this, on Tuesday Netanyahu reportedly told his colleagues that through their recent actions, the Palestinians have abrogated the foundations of the peace process. As he put it, "By boycotting negotiations and by going instead to the United Nations [to achieve independent statehood], they [the Palestinians] have reneged on a central tenet of Oslo."
That tenet, which formed the basis of the Oslo peace process, was "land for peace." As Netanyahu explained, Israel gave up land within the framework of the Oslo Accords. In exchange the Palestinians committed to resolve their conflict with Israel through direct negotiations that would lead to peace.
Their UN gambit, like Abbas's statement to Egyptian television, shows that the Palestinians - not Israel - have been lying all along. They pocketed Israel's territorial concessions and refused to make peace.
So why do the likes of Sarkozy and Obama hate Netanyahu? Why is he "a liar?" Why don't they pour out their venom on Abbas, who really does lie to them on a regular basis? The answer is because they prefer to blame Israel rather than acknowledge that their positive assessments of the Palestinians are nothing more than fantasy....
Scarcely a day goes by when some foreign leader, commentator or activist doesn't say that being pro-Israel doesn't mean being pro-Israeli government. And like Obama's campaign-trail statement, Clinton's diatribe, Sarkozy and Obama's vile gossip about Netanyahu and Britain's self-congratulatory declarations and veiled threats, those who make a distinction between the Israeli people and the Israeli government ignore two important facts.
First, Israel is a democracy. Its governments reflect the will of the Israeli people and therefore, are inseparable from the people. If you harbor contempt for Israel's elected leaders, then by definition you harbor contempt for the Israeli public. And this makes you anti-Israel.
The second fact these statements ignore is that Israel is the US's and Europe's stalwart ally. If Sarkozy and Obama had said what they said about Netanyahu in a conversation about German Chancellor Angela Merkel, or if Netanyahu had made similar statements about Obama or Sarkozy, the revelation of the statements would have sparked international outcries of indignation and been roundly condemned from all quarters.
And this brings us to the other troubling aspect of Sarkozy and Obama's nasty exchange about Netanyahu. Their views reflect a wider anti-Israel climate. Outside the Jewish world, Sarkozy's and Obama's hateful, false statements about their ally provoked no outrage. Indeed, it took the media three days to even report their conversation.
This indicates that Obama and Sarkozy aren't alone in holding Israel to a double standard. They aren't the only ones blaming Israel for the Palestinians' bad behavior. The Western media also holds Israel to a separate standard. Like Obama and Sarkozy, the media blame Israel and its elected leaders for the Palestinians' duplicity. Like Obama and Sarkozy, the media blame Israel for failing to make their peace fantasies come true. And that is the real message of the Obama- Sarkozy exchange last week. Through it we learn that blaming the Jews and the Jewish state for their enemies' behavior is what passes for polite conversation among Western elites today.
More here
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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)
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