A MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HEALTHY NEW YEAR TO ALL THOSE WHO COME BY HERE

Only old guys wish you a healthy new year!  I expect to be blogging more or less as usual over the Christmas period  -- though there may be a few gaps.  I have already had one big family celebration, which was very enjoyable.  I have family allies for my conservative views but there are some Leftish views too.  No hostility though.  We manage to have perfectly civil discussions.

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We Aren't Quite as Stupid as They Think

Most politicians and many in the media truly believe we are stupid. We are the masses. We are those meant to receive a pat on the head, an empty promise and a warm feeling --- that leaves us empty. Trust me, I was in this business, and while those in it now think I am not on to them, I am. I know when I get the run-around or that pat on the head. So let me just take some stories in the news as we end the year and apply this concept to them.

Let's start with the story of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's stomach virus that led to massive dehydration that led to a fall at home and a failure to go to the hospital with a serious concussion. Now I have made it clear in the past that I consider former President Clinton a roaring conservative as compared to President Obama, and I am not accusing Secretary Clinton of lying. But the fact that hearings were to be held on the entire Benghazi debacle, the State Department was already set to be given blame by a White house appointed panel, and suddenly Hillary Clinton simply could not testify -- give me a break. Do they think we are stupid? Yes, they do.

On the subject of tragic shooting at a Connecticut elementary school, I'm not a big on guns personally, and when I hear of these types of senseless murders, particularly of innocent young children, I am prone to ask questions about the sale of certain weapons and ammunition.

But as soon as I start seeing the Drudge Report carrying immediate talk of efforts toward gun control and later see a television news bulletin with President Obama naming Joe Biden to head up a special something or another to deal with gun control, then I realize that once again emotions of the moment are being manipulated by politicians. And whatever shift in my views over gun rights that might naturally have occurred end as I hear television news "reporters" arguing with those opposed to changes in the law or pontificating while "reporting" the news. Do they think we are stupid? Yes, they do.

And that, of course, leads us to the continuing "stalled" negotiations over the "fiscal cliff." My, my, it is almost Christmas, the Senate is going home, and the big bad speaker and President Obama are seemingly stalled in a lockdown over spending cuts and who qualifies to be a millionaire.

Hah, what a laugh. Make no mistake, a last-minute bill will be agreed to before the end of the year. Special treatment will be extended to the defense industry to avoid the dreadful cuts that would have occurred under the automatic sequestration that otherwise would have kicked in on Jan. 1. Unemployment benefits will be extended, and taxes for those earning over, say, $400,000 -- or perhaps a bit more or less -- will go up. Sounds OK, right? Again they think we are stupid.

In the process, the Republican's long-fought battle, which raised many a penny in campaign contributions to fight the so-called "death tax," will be thrown right out the window. In the end, whether by January or more likely next year, deductions and credits that have served to stimulate the economy will be curtailed or eliminated. Who will suffer in the long term? The answer is the integrity and word of the GOP, and conservatives and plenty who have fought for their cause only to see another last-minute deal that will never ever really reduce the deficit.

Oh, and by the way, the world was set to end on Dec. 21, as well. Oh, that got plenty of media attention. And you know why? That's right, they think we are stupid. And if I've written another version of this in years past, blame it on stupidity!

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The strange things that bother Europe

Still obsessed with the Jews  -- while real problems are ignored

More than 40,000 people have been slaughtered during the rebellion in Syria, and the death toll rises daily. The European Union does not appear to be particularly concerned. North Korea’s rulers have launched a three-stage rocket, moving closer to their goal of developing a nuclear-tipped ICBM, and they’re sharing nuclear-weapons technology with the world’s leading sponsors of terrorism in Iran. The EU does not seem to be worrying about that either. Israel is considering building homes on barren hills adjacent to Jerusalem. The EU’s 27 foreign ministers said they were “deeply dismayed” and warned Israel of unspecified consequences if the plan is carried out.

The European Union — recent winner, I should note, of the Nobel Peace Prize — has its priorities. So let’s talk about what the Israelis are doing to so distress them.

The area in which Israel may build covers 4.6 square miles. For the sake of comparison, Denver International Airport is 53 square miles. Known as E1, this area lies within a territory that has a much older name: the Judean Desert. Might Jews think they have a legitimate historical claim to the Judean Desert? This question is rarely asked.

For Israeli military planners, E1’s strategic value is more germane than its history. Developing it would help in the defense of Jerusalem, and would connect Jerusalem to Maaleh Adumim, an Israeli town with a population of 40,000. Media reports note that both Israelis and Palestinians claim Jerusalem as their capital. Media reports often fail to note that right now both Jews and Arabs live in Jerusalem — for the most part peacefully, with both populations growing — while Hamas vows to forcibly expel every Jew from Jerusalem. Such threats of ethnic cleansing also do not trouble the EU much.

It has been widely reported that if Israel should build in E1, the possibility of a two-state solution would be shattered. The New York Times was among those reporting this but, to the paper’s credit, it later published a correction, stating that building in E1 actually “would not divide the West Bank in two,” nor would it cut off the West Bank cities Ramallah and Bethlehem from Jerusalem. Anyone looking at a map would see that.

People forget, or perhaps choose not to remember, that Israelis always have been willing to give up land for peace, including land acquired in defensive wars. Historically, that has not been a common practice, for a very sound reason: Aggression can be deterred only if it carries substantial risk. Nevertheless, Israelis gave up Gaza and the Sinai, and have offered to give up more land — at least 97 percent of the West Bank, retaining only those areas absolutely necessary for national security.

Israelis do want something in exchange: an end to the long conflict they have been fighting against those who insist that the Jewish people, uniquely, has no right to self-determination, no right to independence, no right to self-rule within their ancient and ancestral homeland.

What Israelis have received instead: missile and terrorist attacks and, last week, Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal at a rally in Gaza proclaiming that “jihad,” armed struggle, will continue until Israel is defeated, conquered, and replaced — every square mile — by an Islamist theocracy.

“Since Palestine is ours, and it is the land of the Arabs and Islam,” he said, “it is unthinkable that we would recognize the legitimacy of the Israeli occupation of it. . . . Let me emphasize that we adhere to this fundamental principle: We do not recognize Israel . . . The Palestinian resistance will crush it and sweep it away, be it Allah’s will.” He added: “We will free Jerusalem inch by inch, stone by stone. Israel has no right to be in Jerusalem.”

Within the EU there was a debate about whether to comment on that. Eventually, pressure from Germany and the Czech Republic led the EU to issue a mild rebuke to Hamas — a single paragraph in a three-page statement focusing on Israel’s “dismaying” behavior.

Mahmoud Abbas, regarded as a moderate Palestinian leader, could not bring himself to call Mashaal’s latest threats wrong — or even unhelpful. Instead, Azzam Alahmed, a senior official in Abbas’s Fatah organization, described Mashaal’s speech as “very positive,” because it stressed the need for reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah. Such reconciliation would be achieved not by Hamas softening its positions, but by Fatah more explicitly agreeing that Israel’s extermination — rather than a two-state solution — remains the Palestinian goal, the final solution, if you will.

Just after the conclusion of the truce halting the most recent Hamas/Israel battle, Abbas went to the U.N. General Assembly to request that Palestine be recognized as a “non-member state.” The outcome was never in doubt — the UNGA, which cannot with a straight face be described as a deliberative body, has a reflexively anti-Israeli majority. Abbas’s action was a blatant violation of the Oslo Accords, under which any change in the Palestinians’ status is to come about only through negotiations with Israel.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman laments that “the Europeans in general, and the European left in particular, have so little influence” in Israel. He is puzzled as to why that is. He insists that “it’s incumbent on every Israeli leader to test, test and test again — using every ounce of Israeli creativity — to see if Israel can find a Palestinian partner for a secure peace.” Only by so doing, he adds, can Israel “have the moral high ground in a permanent struggle.”

If “creative” Israelis were to find such a partner, would Friedman be able to arrange a life-insurance policy for him? And between those threatening their neighbors with genocide — which is, indisputably, what Hamas is doing — and those offering to negotiate peace with their neighbors — which is what Israel is doing — can there really be ambiguity about who holds the moral high ground?

Evidently, there can — at least for Friedman and the EU and, I’m afraid, lots of other folks around the world. Israelis, and their few friends, may just have to learn to live with that as best they can.

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Liberal Obsession With Race is Growing Old

Anything that will feed their hate they love  -- even if it means they have to live in the past  -- JR

Jonah Goldberg

When will liberals stop living in the past? Specifically, when will they accept that they aren't all that stands between a wonderful, tolerant America and Jim Crow?

I was in the room when, during the Democratic convention, civil rights hero John Lewis suggested that Republicans wanted to "go back" to the days when black men like him could be beaten in the street by the enforcers of Jim Crow. I thought it an outrageous and disgusting bit of demagoguery. The audience of Democratic delegates cheered in a riot of self-congratulation.

It's bizarre. I spend most of my time talking or listening to fellow conservatives, and I never hear anybody talk about wanting anything of the sort. But to listen to liberals, that's all we care about.

Toward the end of the presidential campaign, various liberal pundits -- a great many of them born after the signing of the Civil Rights Act -- thought it a brilliant and damning indictment to note that Mitt Romney ran strong in states that once comprised the Confederacy. When Barack Obama won, Jon Stewart conceded that at least Romney won "most of the Confederacy."

These states committed the obvious sin of voting Republican while the president was black.

Just this week, in an essay for the New York Times, Adolph Reed attacked South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley -- the first female Indian American governor in America -- for appointing Rep. Tim Scott to retiring Sen. Jim DeMint's seat. Scott is a black man and a conservative Tea Party favorite.

So obviously, this is a very clever ploy to restore Jim Crow.

"Just as white Southern Democrats once used cynical manipulations -- poll taxes, grandfather clauses, literacy tests -- to get around the 15th Amendment," Reed writes, "so modern-day Republicans have deployed blacks to undermine black interests."

That's it exactly. Indeed, that's what the Tea Party was always about: undermining black interests.

When Herman Cain -- another inconveniently black man -- was the overwhelming preference among Tea Party activists for the Republican presidential nomination, a historian writing in The New York Times suggested that Cain could be seen as proof the legacy of the Ku Klux Klan lives on.

You know you've been pounding a square peg into a round hole for too long when you find yourself insinuating that a black man from Georgia represents the KKK tradition in contemporary politics.

More recently, liberal writers apparently convinced themselves that Republican opposition to Susan Rice becoming the next secretary of state was payback for the Emancipation or something.

"Angry over the reelection of the nation's first black president," vented a writer for The American Prospect, "a handful of old white senators -- one of whom hails from the cradle of the Confederacy -- launch hysterical and dishonest attacks on ... a well-qualified African American woman."

The Washington Post editorial board connected the dots, too, finding it important to note that of the Republican legislators expressing their reservations about Rice, "nearly half are from states of the former Confederacy."

Of course, the same racist representatives of Dixie also thought it fine to confirm Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice for the same job.

It's like a metastasizing cancer of delusion. Jim Sleeper, a lecturer at Yale and once a relatively sober-minded liberal writer, insists that opposition to gun control has something to do with the segregationist mind-set. Or something.

To watch MSNBC is to think the hosts see themselves as the official newsletter of the Underground Railroad.

Sure, there are racists in the Republican Party. (There are some in the Democratic Party, too.) And if you define racism as disagreeing with the Congressional Black Caucus or Barack Obama, the GOP is racist to the bone.

But the inconvenient truth is that conservatives are not only not racist, they aren't a fraction as obsessed with race as liberals are.

Of course, that lack of obsession is no doubt itself proof of conservative racism. And why shouldn't it be? Everything else is.

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ELSEWHERE

Schools claim “major victory” after contraception mandate ruling:  "Two religious-affiliated colleges claimed a 'major victory' Tuesday after a federal appeals court ordered the Obama administration to verify that it is revising the so-called contraception mandate in ObamaCare. The decision out of the D.C. Court of Appeals effectively reinstated a challenge that had been dismissed by lower courts. Wheaton College and Belmont Abbey College were arguing against the federal healthcare overhaul rule that requires employers to provide access to contraceptive care. The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which has represented several plaintiffs challenging the rule, hailed the court decision."

SPLC attacks dangerous extremists:  "The Southern Poverty Law Center, the thought-control outfit by which millionaire Morris Dees terrifies old ladies into sending him their Social Security checks, is an important arm of the regime. Its targets often include quite despicable people, but just as often seem to include normal Americans whose views happen to fall outside the three-by-five card of acceptable opinion as defined by the New York Times. ... This time the target is anarcho-capitalists, who are evidently on the verge of taking over this here country, and who hold the dangerous view that no one should initiate violence against anyone else."

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena .  GUN WATCH is now put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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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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