Names, names, names

Personal names are rather an interest of mine. I find them revealing. They tell me a lot about people's background. When I hear surnames like Kerkorian or Krikorian or Khachaturian I know, for instance, that the person is of Armenian origin. And a Hryniuk or a Gavrishchuk is of Ukrainian origin etc. The "ian" or the "uk" endings tell the story.

So it bugs me a little when people change their surnames. I think a Robert Zimmerman who calls himself Bob Dylan is perpetrating an imposture, for instance. Why pretend to be Welsh when you are an Ashkenazi American?

OK. I know that there are sometimes good reasons to change your name. I knew a guy of Greek origin once whose surname was Drakakis. He changed it to "Drake" on the grounds that his original name sounded like something you got on your shoe if you walked along the street without looking where you were going. Greeks in fact seem to the the keenest name changers. Spiro Agnostopoulos became Spiro Agnew before he became vice-president of the United States and Jennifer Aniston would be Jennifer Anastassakis except for a name change. I actually don't mind Greek surnames. "Haralambopoulos" sounds delightfully absurd (I wonder what it means?) and I had a thoroughly admirable friend years ago named Panayotis Kokkinidis. Can you get more Greek than that? He somehow seems to have ended up in Vietnam these days, of all places. They are lucky to have him.

Another interesting thing is what Christian names say about social class. American blacks, for instance often devise quite "creative" names for their children in an apparent effort to say something good about the progeny concerned. But it doesn't. Such names simply say "black" -- and, with all due apologies, that is NOT prestigious.

In British and Australian circles, the most authoritative arbiters of good taste are of course the Royal Family and, with names like Charles, Edward, Andrew, Anne, Margaret, Elizabeth, Harry and William, I think the message is clear -- that they prefer traditional names. In the circumstances I note with some satisfaction that an old friend of mine named his sons Tom and Bill -- and my son is Joe. There is a similar message about Christian names here, in an article from "The Times" of London.

I must admit, however, that my mother got a bit carried away. She named her sons John and Christopher, which is fine, but she named her daughters Jacqueline and Roxanne -- French names. But the Australian love of abbreviations defeated any grand ambitions. My late sister Jacqueline was always known in the family as "Jack" and the fine husband of my gorgeous sister Roxanne generally refers to her as "Rock"!

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Calling Off the Boston Tea Party

by Burt Prelutsky

I'm sure that most of us have heard the inspiring story of the Boston Tea Party. At least when I was in school, they were still relating the tale of a handful of American patriots, including Samuel Adams and Paul Revere, who, weary of taxation without representation, dumped large amounts of English tea into Boston Harbor. Well, if I could include time travel among my many talents, I just might go back to 1773 and try to persuade them to reconsider.

"Boys," I'd say to them, "I understand your frustration. But you have no idea what this is going to lead to down the road. I know that King George is as crazy as a loon, but a couple of hundred years from now, your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren are going to have to answer to Ted Kennedy and John Kerry. Compared to them, King George looks as wise as King Solomon and as congenial as Ben Franklin."

I mean, when you start adding up what it costs the typical taxpayer to keep councilmen, aldermen, mayors, assemblymen, state senators, governors, congressmen, U.S. senators and the president -- not to mention their legions of secretaries, assistants, consultants, pollsters and assorted mistresses -- clothed, housed, fed and pensioned, the colonists were getting off dirt cheap. I'd gladly pay a few extra cents for a cup of tea if it meant that these thousands of freeloaders would be forced to leave their cushy fiefdoms and go find honest work.

The bottom line is that taxation without representation is bad, but taxation with representation is worse.

Speaking of politicians, in a letter to the editor, a reader of the New York Times grumbled: "It's amazing that Andrew Cuomo, who owes his whole career to his dad, may not get the Senate seat of Hillary Rodham Clinton (who owes her whole career to her husband) because David Paterson (who owes his whole career to his dad) may give it to Caroline Kennedy (who owes her whole career to her dad). You would think a state as large as New York could find someone who deserves something on his or her own."

This merely points out how far America has come in recreating a monarchy of our own. But instead of our kings and queens relying on the European rule of progenitor to inherit their crowns, they have chosen to adopt the Hollywood version, better known as nepotism.

As I sit here, nobody is certain who is going to be the senator from Minnesota. That hasn't prevented Al Franken from claiming victory with a margin of 225 votes, in spite of the fact that in at least 25 precincts, there were more ballots than voters!

I am of course hoping that Norm Coleman manages to convince the court that it would be embarrassing, to say the least, to have an election decided by ballots miraculously turning up in car trunks and cellars cast by voters whose last known address was the cemetery. At the very least, Chicago would likely sue over copyright infringement.

On the other hand, there's that devilish little rascal lurking inside me that would like to imagine those other Democratic senators having to put up with the surly, ignorant, arrogant, ill-tempered, unfunny Sen. Franken for the next six years.

Source

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ELSEWHERE

Michael Darby now has a new website here, covering all his many interests but with a stress on his affiliation with the Christian Democratic party, a minor Australian political party of distinctly conservative bent.

The Secular Saint: "Flying back to Los Angeles yesterday afternoon, I happened to look over at the news coverage my airplane seat-mate was watching, thus seeing it with the sound off. What was striking were the images being touted by NBC/MSNBC of the upcoming Obama inauguration. To see the screen (minus the sound) was to be bombarded with television shots that were obviously striving for "iconic" status. Coupled with the teasers I saw later last night, one would think that we are witnessing not just a presidential inauguration, but the canonization of a secular saint. The joyous faces of the anchors, the repeated invocation of the word "historic" -- coupled, of course, with the images referenced above -- reflect a quasi-religious ecstasy, and do nothing if not suggest that a magnificent event of unrivaled proportion is about to unfold before us. Just as secularists have global warming to stand in the place of a religion, they now also have Barack Obama to serve as their all-purpose object of adoration. Obviously, a lot of those on the left and in the media (same difference, for the most part) have taken seriously Obama's hype about this being the moment the "oceans began to fall. And the planet began to heal." [The disillusionment is going to be great fun to watch!]

There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or 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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The Clintons: Rich White Trash

At approximately 12:30 PM on Tuesday, January 20, 2009, the first members of Barack Hussein Obama's official staff will walk up the sidewalk from the parking area between the White House and the Old Executive Office Building and enter the north entrance of the west wing. They will find the offices neat and clean, the desks and file cabinets all empty, the supply cabinets well stocked, the floors and carpets freshly cleaned, and telephones, computers, and FAX machines all in place and in working order, ready to be put to use.

When Obama, himself, enters the White House following the inaugural parade, he will be better prepared to begin serving than any president in history. His predecessor, George Bush, has seen to that. The president and every departing member of his staff have leaned over backward to make the transition as smooth and seamless as possible. Bush has even gone so far as to ask the Congress to release the remaining $350 billion of the $700 billion in Toxic Asset Recovery Program (TARP) funds so that Obama can have a pot of money to spend immediately... and later place all the blame on George Bush when it turns out to be money wasted.

Contrast this transfer of power, from Republicans to Democrats, with the last presidential transition, from Democrats to Republicans. January 20, 2001 was a cold dreary day, rainy and foggy with temperatures in the mid-30s. But the coolness of the day could not compare to the chill that the Bush people felt when they entered the White House that afternoon. According to news report of the day, one of Bush's first acts as president was to order an investigation into what appeared to be "a systematic disabling" of White House communications equipment and a general "trashing" of the White House, the people's house, by members of Bill Clinton's staff.

As news stories described the scene, White House telephone lines were cut and voice-mail messages were rerecorded with lewd and obscene greetings. One Bush staffer's grandmother called from the Midwest and was "horrified" by what she heard on his answering machine.

White House communications were extremely difficult because many telephone lines had been rerouted to the wrong offices. Desks were turned upside down, rubbish was scattered across the floors, file cabinet drawers were glued shut, pornographic photographs and obscene slogans were found in computer printers, and lewd graffiti messages had been scrawled on walls with magic markers. Hundreds of computer keyboards were found to be missing the letter "W". In some instances the `W' keys had been taped to walls above the doorways, twelve feet above the floor. Others were found attached to the walls with superglue.

Offices in Vice President Cheney's quarters were found in what was described as a "complete shambles." When told of the vandalism, the former vice president's wife, Tipper, confessed to being "mortified" by the actions of her husband's staff and issued a personal apology to Cheney. The extent of the vandalism was so great that Bush staffers were ordered not to speak publicly about the trashing of the White House by the departing Clinton people.

In a March 11, 2001 op-ed column, liberal commentator Chris Matthews put the Clintons and the Clinton Administration into context. In discussing the blatant selling of pardons by the Clintons in the final hours, Matthews said, "The junior senator from New York reminds me of the drug dealer's wife in (the movie) `Traffic.' She makes it her business not to know her husband's."

A cocaine smuggler from California won a Clinton pardon after paying a $200,000 fee to Hillary's brother. Four Hasidic Jews defrauded the federal government out of $11 million by applying for funds for a school that didn't exist. Following an Oval Office meeting between Bill and Hillary and leaders of the Hasidic community, their sentences were commuted. The Hasidic community of New Square, NY later voted 1400 to 12 for Hillary. And, of course, everyone knows the story of the pardon granted to the fugitive financier, Marc Rich.

Matthews tells us that, amid the rush of 11th hour presidential pardons, Mrs. Clinton admitted to innocently "passing envelopes" from the pardon-seekers to the White House counsel's office. He goes on to say, "What convenience of mind! She only attended a `meeting,' only heard `rumors,' only passed `envelopes.' Admitting the fact of her behavior, she denies its purpose. She admits what is provable, denies what is not."

Republicans and Democrats are vastly different, morally and ethically. But there is no doubt that the power couples of the Democratic Party, as represented by the Clintons and the Blagojevichs, are like Chevrolet and Pontiac headlamps... totally interchangeable. In describing the Clinton's impact on the country, Matthews opines, "Before this, we laughed at poor little countries that drug dealers and international crooks could buy. We mocked the Third World capitals where a little money in the fingers of a certain family member would open doors or close eyes. "Thanks to Bill and Hillary Clinton, we have now forfeited that small national vanity. The next movie about international drug dealing... may well feature not a Mexican police chief but an American president as the bag man."

Given that our incoming president, Barack Obama, is the candidate of unknown foreign interests who have successfully purchased the presidency for him, and given that he is married to a racist woman who is proud of her country "for the first time," it is clear that Matthews has hit the nail on the head. If the Clintons were willing to pardon 16 Puerto Rican terrorists who murdered innocent Americans in 120 terrorist bombings, in exchange for Puerto Rican votes for Mrs. Clinton's senate campaign, who knows what mischief the Obamas and the Clintons might be capable of now that they've teamed up.

The only difference between the Clintons and the Blagojevichs is that Rod and Patty are still trying to make their fortune, while Bill and Hillary have already cashed in on their government service. They are rich white trash.

Source

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A New Menace to the Economy: 'Zombie' Debtors

Zombies. Seen one lately? If not, you may soon, because they are about to menace the U.S. economy. In financial lingo, zombies are debtors that have little hope of recovery but manage to avoid being wiped out thanks to support from their lenders or the government. Zombies suck life out of an economy by consuming tax money, capital, and labor that would be better deployed in growing companies and sectors. Meanwhile, by slashing prices to generate sales, zombie companies can drag healthier rivals into insolvency.

Sometime in the past few months, zombies went from being a latent risk to a genuine threat-one that is likely to increase in the months ahead. The Bush Administration has already ladled out billions of dollars in assistance to weak banks and automakers. As the economy goes into what may become the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, the Obama Administration will come under even more pressure to prop up sick financial and nonfinancial companies to save jobs. The debate will center on wounded giants such as Citigroup (C), General Motors (GM), and insurer American International Group (AIG). Other sectors with their hands out include steel, airlines, retail-and homeowners, who may be the scariest zombies of all.

Hard choices lie ahead, so it's important to have a sturdy framework for making them. The right approach, say those who have studied the matter, is to prop up a company if its core business is healthy but its financing sources have temporarily shut down. Otherwise, let it go. Postponing the decision by supporting sick and healthy alike will only make the eventual pain greater and reduce growth. "If an institution is poorly managed and does not have a reasonable plan for working out its problems, they ought to go ahead and shoot it," says William M. Isaac, a former Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. chairman who now heads bank consultancy Secura Group.

Japan was plagued by zombies during its lost decade of slow growth in the 1990s. Weak Japanese borrowers used the proceeds from new loans to pay interest on old ones-a process called "evergreening" that kept banks from having to acknowledge losses. In the '80s, the U.S. airline industry was pulled down by Eastern Airlines, which was allowed to keep flying (and charging low fares) while in bankruptcy court. That doesn't help anyone. "At some point, you need to wake up and accept the fact that, 'Oops, that's not going to work,' " says Stephane Teral, an analyst with Infonetics Research who tracked the demise of scads of telecom carriers in the early 2000s.

Protecting zombies can stunt long-term growth by blocking what economist Joseph Schumpeter called "creative destruction"-the painful but necessary reallocation of resources from declining companies and sectors to rising ones. That turns out to be crucial. In the U.S. manufacturing and retail sectors, a huge share of productivity gains have come from such reallocation, says economist Steven J. Davis of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Case in point: the growth of hyperefficient Wal-Mart (WMT) at the expense of mom-and-pop shops, which were allowed to die. The absence of such reallocation could slow productivity growth.

The problem with the current bailout is that the government may be giving money to companies that don't have a long-term future: zombies. On paper, for example, the Treasury Dept. says it invests Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) money only in "healthy banks-banks that are considered viable without government investment" because "they are best positioned to increase the flow of credit in their communities." That's the right idea. In practice, though, the criteria aren't so stringent.

More here

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ELSEWHERE

Notoriously Conservative is a blog with a rather light-hearted and satirical touch -- with a lot of cartoons.

The usual BBC lies: "Yet again, journalistic professionalism is thrown out of the window in the BBC's desperate attempts to attack and sully Israel. A story claiming that IDF soldiers have fired on Gaza civilians attempting to leave their homes - in some cases carrying white flags - is based on totally unverifiable and unsubstantiated claims. The article states that "BBC journalists in Gaza and Israel have compiled detailed accounts of the claims." Who are these BBC journalists in Gaza? On the basis that foreign press have not been allowed access to Gaza, one can only assume that these supposedly neutral observers are, in fact, Palestinians. This seems to be confirmed by a footnote in the story: "Research and reporting by Hamada Abu Qammar in Gaza and Heather Sharp, Fouad Abu Ghosh and Raya el-Din in Jerusalem."

Good politics but poor strategy: "Israel declared a unilateral cease-fire in the Gaza Strip on Sunday meant to end three devastating weeks of war against Hamas militants, but just hours later militants fired a volley of rockets into southern Israel, officials said, threatening to reignite the violence. No one was injured in the assault in which five rockets were fired and four landed. But shortly afterward, security sources in the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun reported an airstrike that wounded a woman and her child. The Israeli military had no comment. In another incident after the truce took hold, militants fired small arms at an infantry patrol, which directed artillery and aircraft to strike back, the military said. "Israel will only act in response to attacks by Hamas, either rockets into Israel or firing upon our forces," government spokesman Mark Regev said. "If Hamas does deliberately torpedo this cease-fire, they are exposing themselves before the entire international community as a group of cynical extremists that have absolutely no interest in the well-being of the people of Gaza." Regev would not say what level of violence would provoke Israel to call off the truce."

Why Norm Coleman Will Win : "Norm Coleman won on election night and he continued to lead throughout the administrative canvassing process that followed. In the next stage - the administrative recount - Minnesota law restricted what the state Canvassing Board could consider, and in the end the Board certified numbers that are premature, inaccurate and not valid. Minnesota election law specifically leaves these and other unresolved issues for the contest phase, which is just getting underway and will be tried before a three-judge panel at the end of January. During that contest, Al Franken's lead will disappear and Norm Coleman will be declared the winner when the following errors are corrected..."

Queer soup? "Many people aren't aware that when their school participates in Campbell's "Labels for Education" program they are supporting a company that has openly come out in support of homosexual marriage, and it has no intentions of stopping that support. "Labels for Education" provides equipment for schools in exchange for proofs of purchase from the family of Campbell's brands. Many of the schools that participate don't know that Campbell's supports the homosexual publication The Advocate with advertising. The Advocate is a leading promoter of same-sex marriage. AFA asked Campbell's to be neutral in the culture war. Campbell's refused and said it would continue to support The Advocate. The Media Daily News reported that a Campbell spokesman was quoted as saying: "Our plans for the Swanson brand [a division of Campbell's] include additional placements in The Advocate." To show their commitment to same-sex marriage, Campbell's sought out and featured two "married" lesbians and their son in one of the ads."

There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or 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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A sad day

The loss of a great entertainer



British writer John Mortimer, creator of the curmudgeonly criminal lawyer Rumpole of the Bailey, has died at 85, his publisher said. Mortimer combined a career as a lawyer with a prolific literary output that included dozens of screen and stage plays and radio dramas. Among his most famous creations was Horace Rumpole, the cigar-smoking, wine-loving barrister who appeared in a television series and a string of novels and stories.

"It's hard to think he's gone," said Tony Lacey, his editor at publisher Viking. "At least we're lucky enough to have Rumpole to remind us just how remarkable he was."

Born on April 21, 1923, and educated at Oxford University, Mortimer qualified as a lawyer in the 1940s and worked as a barrister in the British courts. A lifelong supporter of the Labour Party - sometimes dubbed a champagne socialist by his critics - Mortimer took up several freedom of speech cases. He defended Penguin, the publisher of Lady Chatterley's Lover, against obscenity charges in the 1960s, and later represented the radical magazine Oz at an obscenity trial.

He combined legal and literary careers, writing early in the morning before heading off to court, and produced novels and radio plays from the 1950s.

Source

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Leave the New Deal in the History Books

Cut corporate taxes to zero and create real jobs.

When Barack Obama takes office on Tuesday, his first order of business will be a stimulus package estimated to be close to $1 trillion, including $300 million in tax cuts and the largest new government spending program for infrastructure since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Sages nod that replicating aspects of FDR's New Deal will help pull the country out of a recession. But the experience under FDR largely provides a cautionary tale.

Mr. Obama's policy plans are driven by the conventional economic wisdom that the New Deal economic programs ended the Great Depression. Not so. In fact, thanks to New Deal policies and programs, the U.S. economy faltered for years longer than it might otherwise have done.

President Roosevelt came to office much as Barack Obama will, shouldering an economic crisis that began under his predecessor. In 1933, Roosevelt's first year, unemployment hit nearly 25%, as people lost jobs and homes in towns across the country. Believing that government played a key role in restarting growth, FDR, within his first 100 days as president, created an alphabet soup of new agencies that mandated actions or controlled public spending and impacted private capital flow within the U.S. economy.

At first, it seemed to be working. After four years of FDR's policies, joblessness declined to 14.3% -- still very high but heading in the right direction. Then things turned for worse again: By the fall of 1937, the U.S. entered a secondary depression and unemployment began to rise, reaching 19% in 1938. By 1939 Roosevelt's own Treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau, had realized that the New Deal economic policies had failed. "We have tried spending money," Morgenthau wrote in his diary. "We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. . . . After eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. . . . And an enormous debt to boot!"

The problem was that neither Roosevelt nor President Herbert Hoover before him grasped the essential nature of the crisis, which was not the stock-market crash, but global deflation. At the end of the roaring '20s, an overhang of intergovernmental war debt from World War I, coupled with falling commodity prices and a currency crisis, had started the decline. Weak credit structures and European banks hurt by wartime inflation worsened it. When the Austrian Creditanstalt Bank failed, it ignited a global banking crisis that slashed across the international financial system cutting down everything in its path. Deflation went into full howl.

The same perils are now confronting President-elect Barack Obama, as the risk of deflation casts a long shadow over the economy. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson have been correctly focused on shoring up financial institutions to prevent a collapse of the financial system, and stave off a severe decline in the general price level. If that were to occur, the unspoken fear has been that the U.S. and global economy could go into a deflationary death spiral that would cause the collapse of the international financial system.

As a short-term matter, the moves of the Fed and other central banks have been correct, but in the long term a return to growth will depend on dynamic job creation by American business -- not the U.S. government. Under a two-year plan designed to create three million to four million jobs, Mr. Obama's plan would have the federal government begin distributing funds for public-works projects carried out by the states. With government already spending 20% of GDP, federal government, not private enterprise, will become the growth industry. The effect of these policies, like FDR's, will be to lengthen the pain.

Early on, Roosevelt's economic thinking was that laissez-faire competition drove prices and wages down, resulting in unemployment, which in turn collapsed demand for goods and services. To remedy this, his administration passed laws such as the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) that encouraged business to collude and raise prices without fear of antitrust prosecution. The hope was that this would allow business to raise wages.

By the time NIRA was found unconstitutional a few years later, the damage had already been done. For example, the Department of the Interior complained that over two years it had received 260 bids from different steel companies that were identical to the penny and 50% higher than foreign bids. The policy had put chains on every normal free-market instinct and price feedback mechanism needed to restore economic growth. Roosevelt himself rued the decision in the late 1930s as a secondary depression was gripping the economy. "The disappearance of price competition," he said, "is one of the primary causes of the difficulties."

In addition to New Deal spending programs, a series of new taxes were introduced that crushed the innovation, risk taking, and growth plans of entrepreneurs, corporations and investors. From 1930 to 1940, the top marginal income-tax rate rose to 79% from 25% while the corporate income-tax rate doubled to 24% from 12%. In addition, Roosevelt tacked on an excess profits tax and undistributed profits tax. He imposed an excise tax on dividends. Even the new Social Security payroll tax added 2%. As a result, the New Deal forced the allocation of money away from the private sector. As economist Henry Hazlitt wrote back in 1946, New Deal programs prevented the creation of the types of jobs which have the multiplier effect of successful businesses. Creating "work" prevented innovation and new jobs that would create other jobs.

The quickest way to strengthen the credit system and begin the end of this crisis is to get money into the economy for true job creation, and not into government work programs. The way to do this is to slash taxes. The U.S. corporate tax rate, currently the highest in the world, should be cut to 0% (corporate income would still be taxed, of course, when distributed to shareholders as dividends). The capital-gains tax should be cut further.

The positive impact on corporate-credit markets, the stock market, the attractiveness of the U.S. to foreign investors, and the willingness to take business risk and create new jobs would be immediate. Capital-gains tax collections would rise. Capital flows would be in the hands of those who are driven to build businesses and permanent jobs efficiently instead of pushing that capital through a government pipeline with endless amounts of friction. If the U.S. is to lead the international economic community out of this crisis, this is the place to start.

Mr. Obama will come to office next week with plenty of political capital and the faith of a majority of Americans that he can help pull the country out of its economic woes. As he takes over the reins, his success will be judged not on rhetoric but on the numbers his policies can generate. The best thing he can do is leave the New Deal in the history books.

Source

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The Blue Dogs: Moderate Democrats may hold the balance of power in the Obama presidency

Sitting in his office a stone's throw from where the festivities will take place, I ask about his role in the big transformation coming to Washington. He's one of the leaders of a gang of moderate Democrats called the Blue Dogs. They're meeting their first Democratic president in a while, and Mr. Cooper may have a big effect on the agenda. He smiles gently and says, "If we were to ally with the Republicans, we could swing any vote in the House of Representatives." He hastens to add, "We don't want to do that, we aren't planning on doing that."

With the victories of a number of conservative Democrats in the last election, the Blue Dogs have grown to 51 in number from 46, with more applications pending. "For a long time we had to limit our numbers because we actually need to be able to fit in one room," he tells me. "So it's been an increasingly popular, and I think influential, group."

Indeed, the way the Blue Dogs flex their muscle may become one of the defining issues of the Obama administration's opening months. If they are inclined to wrangle with Nancy Pelosi and the more liberal contingent in the Democratic Party, they will drive policy, especially as a check on spending. "Ideally the White House will see things our way, so they will present legislation on the Hill that we find acceptable," Mr. Cooper says. "If they stray too much from that or if a certain part of Congress strays too much from that, then we may have to object."

So far, however, the Blue Dogs seem to believe that Barack Obama is one of them, a fiscal reformer, and their last best hope for true change on entitlement spending and economic responsibility. Mr. Obama has announced he will convene a fiscal responsibility summit in February to bring together Blue Dogs and other folks to discuss the long-term problems of the economy, including entitlement spending. "We've kicked this can down the road and now we are at the end of the road," the president-elect told the Washington Post this week.....

The problems of the deficit are staggering, and have been Mr. Cooper's long preoccupation, as well as the essence of his Blue Dog soul. He was among a number of members who once left signboards outside their offices in the Longworth office building tracking the share of the national debt per capita including unfunded Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security costs (now around $180,000). "Then they banned signage," he grumps. "I think it's a free speech issue but they say it's a fire safety issue."

It's even worse than most people think, he says, because of dodgy accounting used by the federal government. While we've been warned about the trillion-dollar deficit Mr. Obama is facing, accrual accounting and properly audited numbers from the U.S. Treasury Department would show the deficit last year was $3 trillion, according to this former Rhodes scholar and investment banker. "The U.S. government uses cash accounting," he says. "That is illegal for any enterprise of any size in America except for the U.S. government. Every for-profit business, every not-for-profit business, every state and local government has to use real accounting except for Uncle Sam." .....

One item likely to hit the agenda during Mr. Obama's early weeks that the Blue Dogs can be instrumental on is health care. Here Mr. Cooper has some history of his own. Back in 1992 and '93, when HillaryCare was in full throttle, he came up with an alternative plan that attracted wide bipartisan support -- eventually garnering 58 co-sponsors in the House and earning him Mrs. Clinton's wrath. Now, the moment for real reform has arrived. He feels Mr. Obama is in a position to get what would be "the signature achievement of a half-century" done in his first few months.

The plan Mr. Cooper favors is the Wyden-Bennett bill -- named after Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden and Utah GOP Sen. Bob Bennett -- which he says would basically give everyone in American the same coverage Congress has. "There has never been a bill with so much bipartisan support before the swearing in of a new president," he says. "The challenge now for Democrats is whether we let the best be the enemy of the good. There are many Democrats who want a single-payer program."

It's hard to teach old Democrats new tricks. But Mr. Obama didn't campaign on single-payer; he campaigned on a mixed system. Incoming Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Daschle has said in confirmation hearings that he wants a 70-vote majority or better for health-care reform, and not just to squeak by. "Every day we wait risks the end of the honeymoon and failure of this grand initiative," Mr. Cooper advises.

More here

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or 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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There is also a conflict between Arab nationalists and Islamists being played out in the M.E.

In Iran, elements from within the regime are reportedly offering a $US1 million ($1.5 million) reward for the assassination of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak because of his opposition to Hamas in the Gaza Strip. In Lebanon, the leader of Hezbollah, backed by Iran and Syria, merely calls for the Egyptian Government's overthrow.

In response to this, the editor-in-chief of the Saudi newspaper Al-Sharq al-Awsat, Tariq Alhomayed, describes Hamas as Tehran's tool and argues: "Iran is a real threat to Arab security." Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit agrees, and he is not alone. When Arab states met to discuss the Gaza crisis, Saudi Arabia vetoed any action. Even the Palestinian Authority blames Hamas for the fighting. Activists in Hamas's Palestinian rival Fatah, which runs the authority, make no secret of their hope that Hamas loses the war.

Welcome to the new Middle East, characterised not just by the Arab-Israeli conflict, but by Arab nationalists versus Islamists. Recognising this reality, the Palestinian Authority and virtually all the Arab countries other than Iran's ally Syria, want to see Hamas defeated in the Gaza Strip. Given their strong interest in thwarting Islamist revolutionary groups, especially those aligned with Iran, the Arab states are not inclined to listen to the "Arab street", which is far quieter than it was during previous conflicts, such as the 1991 war in Kuwait, the 2000-04 Palestinian uprising or the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war.

Today's Middle East is very different from the old one in many significant ways. First, the internal politics of every Arab country revolves around a battle between Arab nationalist rulers and a radical Islamist opposition. In other words, Hamas's allies are the regimes's enemies. An Islamist state in the Gaza Strip would encourage those who seek to create similar entities in Egypt, Jordan and every other Arab country.

A tremendous price has been paid in lives and treasure for this nationalist-Islamist conflict. The violence has included civil wars among the Palestinians and Algerians, massive bloodshed in Iraq and terrorist campaigns in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. In the Palestinian case, after winning an election victory and making a deal with Fatah for a coalition government, Hamas turned on its nationalist rivals and drove them out of Gaza by force. In return, the Palestinian Authority has been repressing Hamas in the West Bank.

In Lebanon, Hezbollah has been trying to bully its more moderate Sunni Muslim, Christian and Druze rivals into submission. And because the Arab states confront an Iran-Syria alliance that includes Hamas and Hezbollah, in addition to the internal conflicts there is a regional battle between these two blocs. A major aspect of this power-struggle is that the largely Sunni Muslim-led states face a largely Shia Muslim-led competitor for regional hegemony. These two struggles pose far greater dangers to the existing states than does any (largely fabricated) Israeli threat, and the region's rulers know it.

On the other side of the divide, Iran and its allies have put forward the banners of jihad and "resistance" to the US and Israel. Their platform includes Islamist revolutions in every country; Iran as the region's dominant state, backed up by nuclear weapons; no peace with Israel, and no Palestinian state until there can be an Islamist one encompassing all of Israel as well as the West Bank and Gaza Strip; and above all the expulsion of Western influence from the region. This is a highly ambitious program and probably impossible to achieve. Nevertheless, it is a prescription for endless terrorism and war. Both pro-Iranian and anti-Iranian Islamists believe that because God is on their side and their enemies are cowardly, they will win -- and they are quite prepared to spend the next half-century trying to prove it.

Although this seems to be a pessimistic assessment of the regional situation, the radical Islamist side has many weaknesses. Launching losing wars may make Islamists feel good, but being defeated is a costly proposition, because their arrogance and belligerence antagonises many who might otherwise be won over to their cause. And the situation provides a good opportunity for Western policy makers.

The emphasis should be on building coalitions among the relatively moderate Arab states threatened by radical Islamist forces, and on working hard to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, a goal that is in the interests of many in the region. The worst mistake would be to follow the opposite policy, making an inevitably futile effort to appease the extremists or seek to moderate them. Such a campaign actually disheartens the relative moderates who, feeling sold out, will try to cut their own deal with Tehran.

The crisis in Gaza is only one aspect of the much wider battle shaking the region. Helping Hamas would empower radical Islamism and Iranian ambitions, and undercut the Palestinian Authority and everyone else, not just Israel. Arab states don't want to help their worst enemy, so why should anyone else?

Source

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The difference



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Obama the Bushite

By Charles Krauthammer

Except for Richard Nixon, no president since Harry Truman has left office more unloved than George W. Bush. Truman's rehabilitation took decades. Bush's will come sooner. Indeed, it has already begun. The chief revisionist? Barack Obama. Vindication is being expressed not in words but in deeds -- the tacit endorsement conveyed by the Obama continuity-we-can-believe-in transition. It's not just the retention of such key figures as Defense Secretary Bob Gates or Treasury Secretary nominee Timothy Geithner, who, as president of the New York Fed, has been instrumental in guiding the Bush financial rescue over the past year. It's the continuity of policy.

It is the repeated pledge to conduct a withdrawal from Iraq that does not destabilize its new democracy and that, as Vice President-elect Joe Biden said just this week in Baghdad, adheres to the Bush-negotiated status-of-forces agreement that envisions a U.S. withdrawal over three years, not the 16-month timetable on which Obama campaigned.

It is the great care Obama is taking in not preemptively abandoning the anti-terror infrastructure that the Bush administration leaves behind. While still a candidate, Obama voted for the expanded presidential wiretapping (FISA) powers that Bush had fervently pursued. And while Obama opposes waterboarding (already banned, by the way, by Bush's CIA in 2006), he declined George Stephanopoulos's invitation (on ABC's "This Week") to outlaw all interrogation not permitted by the Army Field Manual. Explained Obama: "Dick Cheney's advice was good, which is let's make sure we know everything that's being done," i.e., before throwing out methods simply because Obama campaigned against them.

Obama still disagrees with Cheney's view of the acceptability of some of these techniques. But citing as sage the advice offered by "the most dangerous vice president we've had probably in American history" (according to Joe Biden) -- advice paraphrased by Obama as "we shouldn't be making judgments on the basis of incomplete information or campaign rhetoric" -- is a startlingly early sign of a newly respectful consideration of the Bush-Cheney legacy.

Not from any change of heart. But from simple reality. The beauty of democratic rotations of power is that when the opposition takes office, cheap criticism and calumny will no longer do. The Democrats now own Iraq. They own the war on al-Qaeda. And they own the panoply of anti-terror measures with which the Bush administration kept us safe these past seven years.

Which is why Obama is consciously creating a gulf between what he now dismissively calls "campaign rhetoric" and the policy choices he must make as president. Accordingly, Newsweek -- Obama acolyte and scourge of everything Bush/Cheney -- has on the eve of the Democratic restoration miraculously discovered the arguments for warrantless wiretaps, enhanced interrogation and detention without trial. Indeed, Newsweek's neck-snapping cover declares, "Why Obama May Soon Find Virtue in Cheney's Vision of Power." Obama will be loath to throw away the tools that have kept the homeland safe. Just as he will be loath to jeopardize the remarkable turnaround in American fortunes in Iraq.

Obama opposed the war. But the war is all but over. What remains is an Iraq turned from aggressive, hostile power in the heart of the Middle East to an emerging democracy openly allied with the United States. No president would want to be responsible for undoing that success.

In Iraq, Bush rightly took criticism for all that went wrong -- the WMD fiasco, Abu Ghraib, the descent into bloody chaos in 2005-06. Then Bush goes to Baghdad to ratify the ultimate post-surge success of that troubled campaign -- the signing of a strategic partnership between the United States and Iraq -- and ends up dodging two size 10 shoes for his pains. Absorbing that insult was Bush's final service on Iraq. Whatever venom the war generated is concentrated on Bush himself. By having personalized the responsibility for the awfulness of the war, Bush has done his successor a favor. Obama enters office with a strategic success on his hands -- while Bush leaves the scene taking a shoe for his country.

Which I suspect is why Bush showed such equanimity during a private farewell interview at the White House a few weeks ago. He leaves behind the sinews of war, for the creation of which he has been so vilified but which will serve his successor -- and his country -- well over the coming years. The very continuation by Democrats of Bush's policies will be grudging, if silent, acknowledgment of how much he got right.

Source

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or 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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Solve the Arab refugee problem and you solve the conflict

The most insightful article posted in the last week is Ending the West's Proxy War Against Israel which is subtitled Stop funding a Palestinian youth bulge, and the fighting will stop too. This article, from the WSJ Europe, focuses on the disease and not the symptoms.

The reason for Gaza's endless youth bulge is that a large majority of its population does not have to provide for its offspring. Most babies are fed, clothed, vaccinated and educated by UNRWA. UNRWA is benevolently funded by the U.S. (31%) and the European Union (nearly 50%) - only 7% of the funds come from Muslim sources. Thanks to the West's largesse, nearly the entire population of Gaza lives in a kind of lowly but regularly paid dependence. One result of this unlimited welfare is an endless population boom.

Between 1950 and 2008, Gaza's population has grown from 240,000 to 1.5 million. The West basically created a new Near Eastern people in Gaza that at current trends will reach three million in 2040. Within that period, Gazans may alter the justifications and directions of their aggression but are unlikely to stop the aggression itself.

The West pays for food, schools, medicine and housing, while Muslim nations help out with the military hardware. Unrestrained by such necessities as having to earn a living, the young have plenty of time on their hands for digging tunnels, smuggling, assembling missiles and firing 4,500 of them at Israel since 2006.

The current situation can only get worse. Israel is being pushed into a corner. Gazan teenagers have no future other than war. One rocket master killed is immediately replaced by three young men for whom a martyr's death is no less honorable than victory. Some 230,000 Gazan males, aged 15 to 29, who are available for the battlefield now, will be succeeded by 360,000 boys under 15 (45% of all Gazan males) who could be taking up arms within the coming 15 years. As long as we continue to subsidize Gaza's extreme demographic armament, young Palestinians will likely continue killing their brothers or neighbors.

So it really doesn't matter how much the IDF beats up on Hamas, or controls the Philidelphi Corridor or disarms Hamas, the long term problem remains. Of course the more it does, the more the short term problem of rockets is dealt with. And we can forget about expelling the Arabs from Gaza because they could only flee to the Sinai and Egypt would go to war against Israel to prevent it. Nor will the rest of the world be more amenable to accepting Gazans as refugees. Who among them has offered to take in the inmates in Guantanamo Bay?

Even creating Palestine is not an answer. It would serve to relocate a million "refugees" to Palestine thereby increasing the problem. The problem being that the policies of the West are instrumental in supporting a population explosion which vastly exceeds the creation of jobs. Is the world that stupid or do they have a different agenda.

And yet, despite claiming that it wants to bring peace to the region, the West continues to make the population explosion in Gaza worse every year. By generously supporting UNRWA's budget, the West assists a rate of population increase that is 10 times higher than in their own countries. Much is being said about Iran waging a proxy war against Israel by supporting Hezbollah and Hamas. One may argue that by fueling Gaza's untenable population explosion, the West unintentionally finances a war by proxy against the Jews of Israel.

I am not so naive. UNRWA and Palestine, are intended as a war against Israel. David Gelernter suggests in The answer to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.and I agree with him

"The problem will be solved as soon as the world stops trying to solve it. When the international community moves on to fresh causes, so will the Palestinians."

The problem can only be solved by the U.N. replacing UNRWA and with UNHCR whose mandate it is to resettle refugees. This of course means that the Arabs and the West have to take such refugees in.

[..] it (the West) may consider offering immigration to those young Palestinians only born because of the West's well-meant but cruelly misguided aid. In the decades to come, North America and Europe will have to take in tens of millions of immigrants anyway to slow the aging of their populations. If, say, 200,000 of them are taken from the 360,000 boys coming of age in Gaza in the next 15 years, that would be a negligible move for the big democracies but a quantum leap for peace in the Near East.

Why not take all of them in and then some. Solve the refugee problem and you solve the conflict.

Source

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Deranged NYT hatred of the military

As usual for the Left, any lie will do

In a front-page article on Jan. 2 of this year, The New York Times took a brief respite from its ongoing canonization of Barack Obama and returned to its series on violent crimes committed by returning GIs, or as I call it: "U.S. Military, Psycho Killers."

The Treason Times' banner series about Iraq and Afghanistan veterans accused of murder began in January last year but was quickly discontinued as readers noticed that the Times doggedly refused to provide any statistics comparing veteran murders with murders in any other group. So they waited a year, hoping readers wouldn't notice they were still including no relevant comparisons. What, for example, is the percentage of murderers among veterans compared to the percentage of murderers in the population at large -- or, more germane, in the general population of young males, inasmuch as violent crime is committed almost exclusively by young men? Any group composed primarily of young men will contain a seemingly mammoth number of murderers.

Consider the harmless fantasy game, Dungeons and Dragons -- which happens to be played almost exclusively by young males. When murders were committed in the '80s by (1) young men, who were (2) Dungeons and Dragons enthusiasts, some people concluded that factor (2), rather than factor (1), led to murderous tendencies. Similarly, for its series about how America's bravest and finest young men are really a gang of psychopathic cutthroats, the Times triumphantly produced 121 homicides committed by veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in order to pin the blame for the murders on the U.S. military.

Perhaps the Times' next major expose could be on how a huge percentage of murderers are people who won't ask for directions or share the TV remote.

Let's compare murders by veterans to murders by other 18- to 35-year-olds in the U.S. population at large. From 1976 to 2005, 18- to 24-year-olds -- both male and more gentle females -- committed homicide at a rate of 29.9 per 100,000. Twenty-five- to 35-year-olds committed homicides at a rate of 15.8 per 100,000. Since 9/11, about 1.6 million troops have served in either Iraq or Afghanistan. That makes the homicide rate among veterans of these wars 7.6 per 100,000 -- or about one-third the homicide rate for their age group (18 to 35) in the general population of both sexes.

But fewer than 200,000 of the 1.6 million troops who served in Iraq and Afghanistan have been women, and the murder rate for the general population includes both males and females. Inasmuch as males commit nearly 90 percent of all murders, the rate for males in those age groups is probably nearly double the male/female combined rates, which translates to about 30 to 55 murderers per 100,000 males aged 18 to 35. So comparing the veterans' rate of murder to only their male counterparts in the general population, we see that Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are about 10 times less likely to commit a murder than non-veterans of those wars.

More here

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BrookesNews Update

Obama's public spending program will bea very expensive farce: Sound economics and the lessons of history do not support Obama's claim that government spending is the cure for recession and unemployment. Nevertheless, his ignorant slavish supporters in the media will continue to pump out his dangerous nonsense as the right medicine
The Reserve's fallacious monetary theory got us into this mess : We have a financial crisis and a deepening recession because central banks really do not have a sound monetary theory. They do not even have a grasp of the true nature and power of money. The result is the present mess in which ignorant grandstanding politicians like Obama promise to do the impossible
Labour markets, economic growth and journalistic stupidity : America and Australia are facing a renewed union bureaucracy whose economic fallacies are destructive of capital and jobs. The only way to deal with its politically motivated claptrap is to make the public aware of just how dangerous it is to the country's economic welfare
Carbon Tax: The lesser of two evils : Greenie thugs and their political allies successfully intimidate Exxon Mobil into accepting the economically destructive carbon tax to curb 'global warming' - even as Europe and much of the US freezes. (A cultist is someone who is oblivious to any facts - even when they are physical and stand in plain view - that contradict his fundamental beliefs)
Wow! Israel is back! : Israel finally strikes back at Hamas barbarism - and about time. No matter what, Israel shouldn't give any credence to what the world has to say when it comes to the Jewish state defending itself . I know what would happen if the residents of Tijuana would suddenly start lobbing rockets into San Diego
Castroism at 50 : The Castro gang took over, Cuba, one the world's most prosperous countries, and turned it into a gigantic slum. They drained political prisoners of their blood before murdering them, they shot children, they built a Gulag, they funded terrorism and tried to start a world war. And these murderous sadists are adored by the media and Hollywood intellectuals. The left is well and truly diseased
Blagojevich scandal exposes the Democrats' hypocrisy : The Blagojevich scandal is a running sore that reveals systemic corruption in the Democratic Party and its utter contempt for genuine Democratic principles. If the US mainstream media were not itself utterly corrupt it would have long ago exposed the depraved state of Chicago's Democratic politics and the politicians like Obama to whom it gave birth"
Obama's stimulus plan heading for trouble before it even starts : By completely misunderstanding economic history Obama has come to believe that state spending is the road to prosperity - never mind the lessons of history, especially the embarrassing fact that this policy failed Roosevelt and also recently failed in Japan. And yet this 'brilliant man' and a leader of the 'reality-based community' genuinely believes otherwise

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

****************************

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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The Gaza-Egypt Smuggling Tunnels Must Be Closed

By DORE GOLD

When Israelis look back on what caused the current conflict in Gaza, they point to their government's decision in September 2005 to leave the narrow "Philadelphi Route" that runs along the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula. More than Israel's disengagement from the Strip as a whole, the abandonment of this strategic area made full-scale war inevitable.

The 1994 Gaza-Jericho Agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization placed this 100-meter wide corridor, which separated the Egyptian side of the town of Rafah from the Palestinian side in Gaza, under Israeli military control. (The Israeli army gave it the code name "Philadelphi.") By 2000, local Palestinians, many of whom worked with Hamas, dug underground tunnels between the two halves of Rafah. The tunnels allowed for a lucrative smuggling trade that included weapons.

Admittedly, there were rocket attacks on Israel before the Gaza pullout (the first Qassam rocket was fired in 2001). However, the scale of the attacks totally changed after the withdrawal. Rocket attacks increased by 500% (from 179 in 2005 to 946 in 2006). The range of Hamas's rockets also increased following the withdrawal. Locally manufactured Qassams, which could reach targets seven kilometers away, gave way to Grad/Katyusha rockets supplied by Iran that can hit as far as 20 kilometers. These were first used in 2006. During 2008, rockets with a 40-kilometer range came through the Gaza tunnels and into Hamas's weapons cache.

At the same time that the tunnels facilitated weapons smuggling, they also allowed hundreds of Hamas operatives to leave Gaza for Egypt, where they caught planes to Iran and underwent military training with the Revolutionary Guards at a base outside of Tehran. When Israel controlled the Philadelphi Route, its special forces waged a constant battle and kept the number of tunnels low. But by 2008, with Israeli access to the Philadelphi route cut off and measures against the tunnels halted, the number of tunnels proliferated into the hundreds.

Today, Israelis are concerned that even if Hamas is defeated militarily, its stocks of rockets will be fully replenished by Iran in a matter of months unless the tunnels under the Philadelphi Route are addressed. That is precisely what happened with Hezbollah after the 2006 Lebanon War. The United Nations Security Council cease-fire, Resolution 1701, failed to deal adequately with the rearming of the Lebanese Shiite group. Today, Hezbollah has more rockets threatening Israel than it had prior to the 2006 war. In the case of Hamas, there is an added concern that Iran will supply rockets that reach well beyond the 40-kilometer range. In the next war, Hamas could strike Tel Aviv from inside the Gaza Strip.

How can Israel cut off the smuggling routes? In 2005, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice proposed border controls for the Rafah area. This completely failed because the European Union monitors deployed in Rafah ran away the moment there was an escalation of violence. Today the idea of a new EU monitoring force -- a proposal Western diplomats are discussing -- does not engender much confidence on the Israeli side. Others are hoping that Egypt will take seriously its obligations to close off the smuggling routes from its side. Egypt has failed to do so since 2005. Why should we expect a change now?

If these options fail, Israel may be left with no choice but to enter the Philadelphi Route and continue to destroy these tunnels in the future. Anticipating the end of the Gaza war, there is already talk about the next stage of the Arab-Israeli peace process. Some hope that the peace process can simply be picked up where it was left off and pursued with new determination. But the crisis over the Philadelphi Route has taught Israel a bitter lesson about relinquishing critical territory: It was a cardinal error to leave this strategic zone at the perimeter of Gaza, even if Israel wanted to get out of the Strip in its entirety. Israeli leaders including Yitzhak Rabin have warned that Israel must never leave the Jordan Valley, the equivalent perimeter zone in the West Bank.

Ariel Sharon saw the Jordan Valley as an integral part of Israel's claim to "defensible borders," a term used by President Bush in an April 2004 letter to Israel, that was overwhelmingly backed in special legislation by bipartisan majorities in both houses of U.S. Congress during June 2004. President-elect Barack Obama publicly recognized Israel's right to "defensible borders" at the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) policy conference last year.

The strategic stakes involved in this issue are enormous. Were Israel to be stripped of the Jordan Valley, it would undoubtedly face a massive escalation of weapons smuggling into the West Bank. Should the scale of the smuggling reach the same proportions as in Gaza, it is doubtful that even the Jordanians, motivated by the best of intentions, could bring it to a halt. Moreover, a steady stream of weapons smugglers and Islamist volunteers crossing the kingdom would undermine Jordanian security.

Diplomats are working feverishly to seal off the Philadelphi Route and bring an end to the current Gaza conflict. Let's hope they remember the critical importance of securing Israel's other borders -- for the sake of Israel's security, and for the stability of its neighbors.

Source

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United under the swastika in Canada

Critics of Israel are often quick to insist that they're not anti-Semitic-just anti-Zionist, anti-"occupation," or something along those lines. But not these guys: at a protest against Israel in downtown Calgary on the weekend, the Nazi group, the Aryan Guard, showed up to march alongside the Muslims. Of course, the Aryan Guard is honest enough to admit they just plain hate Jews, not bothering to strain themselves with arguments of nuance. They fit right in on Saturday with their posters of Israeli flags defaced with the accusation "Terror State." As Darcey at Dust My Broom notes, the 150 "anti-racists" who came out in force to protest an Aryan Guard march in downtown Calgary last year didn't complain this time. In fact, they marched right along with the Aryans, united under the swastika: the Arabs and Communists labeling the Jewish State a "Nazi" regime; the skinheads hoping to resurrect the Real McCoy.

Event organizer Shadi Abuid-who last made news a few years back as a university student when he brought to Calgary Norman Finkelstein, the popular anti-Israel author of "The Holocaust Industry"-told Canwest Global he was impressed with the "various groups uniting under one voice." He explained that he had "directly told" the neo-Nazis that he'd prefer they didn't join the march. "But in these demonstrations you can control the crowd but you can't control the emotions . . . you can't deny people's right to walk," he shrugged.

That's true. Except, many of the same organizers behind Saturday's march attempted to deny the freedom-to-demonstrate of an Israeli supporter just the other week. At a protest in front of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's constituency office in southwest Calgary January 2nd, Gazan supporters called the cops to complain when one man showed up waving an Israeli flag. There were 150 pro-Palestinian protestors, but the single Israeli supporter was told by police that he must leave or be charged with "inciting civil disorder," according to this account (with photos). Protestors reportedly cursed at and threw shoes at the man.

The anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, anti-whatever protestors should indeed get the benefit of the doubt when it comes to accusations of being Jew-haters. But attempting to suppress the rights of Israel's supporters, while standing up for the rights of Nazis to march alongside them arm-in-arm, can only make drawing that distinction a lot more difficult.

Source

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ELSEWHERE

Punditarian and I are still having an enjoyable debate about Jewish questions -- but on his blog rather than here. He shows a surprising depth of interest in the Christian scriptures and, like me, takes that all the way back to the original Greek. We are both language freaks, basically. It's something to think about that one of the NY Ashkenazim and an atheist of Scottish Protestant background in a backwater on the opposite side of the globe actually get on very well. I am glad to have made his acquaintance. We don't entirely agree, of course, but it would be boring if we did. From Hegel on, only Leftists glorify marching along in lockstep. Conservatives value the individual.

There is a new rather intellectual blog up called Symbol Pond that readers who have time to spare may enjoy.

Dick McDonald is back online, fighting the good fight against America's corrupt Social Security system. The time will come under the present arrangements when even the elderly will have to work -- with only the sick and the disabled excused.

German police chief apologizes over flag incident: "After the Duisburg police removed an Israeli flag during a demonstration against Israel, there was an uproar. The Duisburg police chief has described the action as wrong. On Sunday the action was brought up in the State parliament. Duisburg's Police chief Rolf Cebin apologized on Sunday for the removal of an Israeli flag in the context of a demonstration against the Gaza war. "I deeply regret that the feelings -- particularly of Jewish citizens -- were hurt". Several police officers broke down a door in Duisburg on Saturday in order to access a dwelling where several Israeli flags were hanging out the window. The house was on the route of a demonstration against the military action of Israel. The demonstrators felt provoked by the flag and threw stones and lumps of ice at the building, said the police. In order to prevent property damage and the escalation of the situation, the police leadership present decided to remove the flag" [Translation by JR. An original report of the action is here]

Obama's Recession Remedy: Tax the Poor! : "Everybody's going to have to give," President-elect Barack Obama warned over the weekend. And some people will have to give more than others -- starting with low-income smokers. Democrats are rushing this week to impose massive tax hikes of at least 61 cents on every cigarette pack sold in America, in addition to new increases on other tobacco products. The money will fund a long-plotted federal expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). Yes, this is Dr. Big Nanny's prescription for recession: punitive tax increases on the poor to feed a universal health care Trojan horse. Obama and his liberal Democratic colleagues sure have a funny way of demonstrating "progressive" values, don't they? Health surveys show that smokers are more likely to be blue-collar workers, minorities and have less than a high-school education

Regulation gives people a false sense of security: "The $50-billion investment scam allegedly pulled off by Wall Street insider Bernard Madoff has ignited predictable calls for more regulation. The "massive fraud ... was made possible in part because the regulators who were assigned to oversee Wall Street dropped the ball," said President-elect Obama. Notice the disconnect. Regulation failed, so we need more regulation. I see it differently. Regulation failed, so let's try free markets. That would be a change. Regulation did indeed fail. "An executive in the securities industry, Harry Markopolos, contacted the SEC's Boston office in May 1999, urging regulators to investigate Mr. Madoff. Mr. Markopolos continued to pursue his accusations over the past nine years," The Wall Street Journal reported. We've always been told that regulation of financial markets protects the least knowledgeable investors. Sophisticated people know what they are doing and can fend for themselves. But Madoff's alleged Ponzi scheme is fascinating precisely because it caught some very knowledgeable people. They knew Madoff. Everyone trusted him, including the regulators.

Netanyahu: Hamas must be toppled: Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday that Israel must remove Gaza's Hamas rulers from power to ensure victory over "terror." He expressed full support for his country's punishing, 18-day offensive against the militants _ even though it is being conducted by politicians who are running against him in Feb. 10 elections. "At the end of the day there will be no alternative but to bring down the regime of Hamas, a terrorist organization pledged to our destruction," Netanyahu told foreign reporters in Jerusalem. Netanyahu, a top contender to become prime minister in next month's vote, said toppling Hamas would not necessarily have to be part of the current offensive, but would eventually have to happen.

Obama's Math Doesn't Add Up : "Even economists who agree with Barack Obama that we need another stimulus are questioning his exuberant predictions that his spending plan will produce or save 3.7 million jobs. That number was contained in the upwardly revised job-creation figures that economic advisers Jared Bernstein and Christina Romer came out with this week in an effort to boost congressional support for Obama's costly stimulus package amid growing skepticism that it will work.

Obama's death tax deadly for jobs: "The news today that Obama and Senate Democrats will move to block the death tax from phasing out as scheduled under current law flies in the face of everything they've been saying about not raising taxes during an economic crisis. It also will undermine their promise to help create jobs, because the death tax destroys as many as 250,000 jobs every year by forcing family businesses to liquidate their assets to pay the tax. These forced liquidations also contribute to the decline in asset values. When we should be lowering barriers to capital formation to cushion the blow of the credit liquidation cycle, it looks like Obama and Senate Democrats are doing the opposite, because they just can't let go of their anti-growth, anti-jobs, tax-the-rich impulse when it comes to the death tax.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here or here or 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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A defender of hopeless causes?

I think there is a saint for hopeless causes. I will have to look him up and shoot him a prayer. I think I need him.

My mother told me once that when I was a kid and she asked me if I had done something naughty I would always admit that I had. She said that I was so honest that she never had the heart to punish me. I sometimes wonder if that honesty is a curse. It sure gets me into a lot of trouble. I am always blowing the whistle on popular beliefs that I can see to be wrong -- as my GREENIE WATCH and FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC blogs attest. If I went with the flow, I would have a lot more fame and fortune, I think. But I do pretty well anyway. My latest bit of skepticism is:

"Some people even believe that William Zantzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll"

And I am sure that we can all remember Bob Dylan (aka Shabtai Zisel ben Avraham) singing that accusation in his nasal voice. But as far as I can see, Zantzinger was innocent. "Zantzinger" is a marvellous name to conjure with (Dylan even invented a "diamond ring finger" to rhyme with it) so no wonder Dylan was tempted but even Dylan's biographer says that the song was a libel:

The Dylan song followed him around his whole life, though he steadfastly refused to talk about it with reporters. In 2001 Bob Dylan biographical Howard Sounes actually got a quote out of him. "[Dylan] is a no-account song a bitch," Zantzinger said. "He's just like a scum bag of the earth. I should have sued him and put him in jail. [The song is] a total lie." Clinton Heylin - perhaps the world's authority on all things Dylan - seems to agree. "Dylan's concern was not the fact themselves but how they might fit with his preconceived notions of injustice and corruption," he wrote in Behind The Shades. "That the song itself is a masterpiece of drama and wordplay does not excuse Dylan's distortions, and 36 years on he continues to misrepresent poor William Zantzinger in concert."

What actually happened seems to be that Zantzinger was drunk after a celebration and did insult the lady and tap her on the shoulder with a toy cane but that did not kill her. She died several hours later of her chronic medical condition: hypertension, arteriosclerosis and a burst cerebral aneurism -- a "stroke" in popular parlance. Zantzinger was convicted of manslaughter because his actions were deemed to have brought on the stroke but that is speculation. Clearly, if the woman had been in normal health, nothing would have happened. So the light sentence Zantzinger received reflected his very low level of culpability rather than anything more sinister. If the court had really been "racist" or even fair, it would not have convicted him of anything at all. And Zantzinger's continued good standing in his community can also be seen as a judgement about his innocence rather than as evidence of "racism" Who among us has not committed indiscretions while drunk?

Hey! Aren't the Lefty whiners who monitor me going to love this one! I wrote the last sentence above ("Who among us...) with them in mind. They will surely use it as a summary of what I say about Zantzinger. Leftists love to quote out of context. The whole truth is generally too destructive of their simplistic ideas. I should have mentioned previously that my fellow Brisbane conservative blogger Leon Bertrand gives the whiners concerned a hard time occasionally.

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Olmert has balls after all

Israel will hit Hamas with an "iron fist" if the Islamist movement does not halt its rocket fire against the Jewish state, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert warned on Monday. "We want to end the operation when the two conditions we have demanded are met: ending the rocket fire and stopping Hamas's rearmament. If these two conditions are met, we will end our operation in Gaza," Olmert said in a speech in the southern town of Ashkelon. "Anything else will meet the iron fist of the Israeli people, who are no longer ready to tolerate the Qassams (rockets)." "Will it take time? Let it take time. We will continue as long as necessary in order to remove this threat," the premier added.

Israel launched a massive operation against the Hamas-ruled territory on December 27 with the declared goal of halting the near-daily rocket fire from Gaza against southern Israel, which has killed four people since the start of the offensive. Israel has conditioned the end of the operation, which has claimed the lives of more than 900 Palestinians, on a complete halt to rocket fire and arms smuggling from Egypt into Gaza. Ashkelon, a port city situated around a dozen kilometres from Gaza, has been hit by dozens of Qassams since the start of the offensive.

Source

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Prof. Barry Rubin sums up the present situation, writing from Israel:

Israel's resolve is unbreakable. May I point out that it took far less than seven years from September 11 to the election of Senator Obama. Three thousand dead civilian Americans did not sustain majority support for a war against terrorism all that long. From Le Monde's "we are all Americans" to its "we are all anti-Americans" (actually it took about a month). You can depend on Israel but can we depend on you (I speak nationally not of you as individuals, of course.).

We have some of our staff fighting in Gaza at this moment. Volunteering for combat units is at incredibly high levels and I know--because they told me so--that my children are ready to follow this tradition. We are putting in 17-hour workdays to try to combat the lies. Many families like us have volunteered to take people from the south into our homes to live with us if they want to leave to avoid the rocket fire. But guess what? Hardly anyone has agreed to leave their homes despite the rockets being shot at them. Except for a handful of extreme left academics and writers for Haaretz (who naturally have the op-ed columns of American and European newspapers opened to them) the country is united. It has no illusions about radical Islamism or Iran. It will be ready, if necessary, to attack Iranian nuclear installations (unless President Obama talks Tehran out of it, which gives you some sense of the outcome).

So please don't underestimate Israelis and their resolve, especially while our people are fighting thirty miles from where I am writing this. This is not your conception of Israel as of, say, 1995. A huge majority supports the war--and that's not just verbal but putting their lives on the line. One month from today Israelis will elect Bibi Netanyahu--not Senator Obama or Nicholas Sarkozy--as leader of the country. So please keep in mind where the criticism should be put, even as the secretary-general of the UN who embraced Iran's president compares Israel to Nazi Germany and when we don't know whether we can even depend on the United States to support us ten days from today.

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Guess Who Cares about Dead Palestinians? Jews!

For those individuals -- such as nearly all members of the world news media -- who, in light of Israels invasion of Gaza -- see moral equivalence between Israel and the Palestinians, here are some clarifying thoughts. First, it would be difficult nearly to the point of impossibility, to find Israeli or other Jews who celebrate the deaths of Palestinian civilians. Jews both within and outside of Israel cringe when they see pictures of dead Palestinian men, women, and children in Gaza. For thousands of years at their Passover seders, Jews have removed wine from their cups to ceremonially weep for the Egyptians -- their erstwhile slave owners for 400 years -- who died during the Jews exodus. Jews have never stopped weeping for enemies.

The opposite is the case with the large majority of Palestinians. It would be quite difficult to find many Palestinians who do not celebrate the deaths of Israeli Jews or non-Israeli Jews. This is not only reflected in Palestinian polls that show majority support for terrorism -- and terrorism means killing innocent Jews -- it is also reflected in Palestinian media, Palestinian schools, and Palestinian mosques that routinely glorify murderers of Jews, and refer to all Jews as monkeys and the like.

Take for example, Palestinian reaction to the 2001 Palestinian terror bombing of a Jerusalem Sbarro pizzeria in which 15 Jews, five of whom were two sets of parents and their children, were murdered and an additional 130 people were injured, some permanently maimed. As reported by the Associated Press, a month later, Palestinian university students opened an exhibition that included a grisly re-enactment of that mass murder. The students built a replica of the Sbarro pizzeria, with fake blood, splattered pizza, a plastic hand dangling from the ceiling, and a fake severed leg wearing jeans and a bloody black sneaker. The exhibit also includes a large rock in front of a mannequin wearing the black hat, black jacket and black trousers typically worn by ultra-Orthodox Jews. A recording from inside the rock calls out: O believer, there is a Jewish man behind me. Come and kill him, paraphrasing a verse in the Koran. It became a popular tourist attraction for Palestinians, to which Palestinian parents took their little children.

Here's the question: Can anyone even imagine Jews, in Israel or anywhere else on earth -- no matter how right-wing they are politically or religiously -- doing something analogous to celebrate the death of Palestinian civilians? I have spoken to Jewish groups on both U.S. coasts since the Israeli invasion of Gaza, and when the subject of Palestinian civilian deaths is mentioned, all I hear is regret and sadness.

This moral chasm that separates Israel from its enemies, and separates the Jews from their enemies, merely confirms what Hamas repeatedly says about itself: We love death more than the Jews love life. This motto is so true that Hamas not only doesnt weep for dead Israelis, it doesnt weep for dead Palestinians. It uses living Palestinians as human shields and uses dead Palestinians as propaganda. The moral disequilibrium is such that Jews weep for dead Palestinian far more than Hamas does.

The second point to be raised is about perspective. If during World War II, Western news media had reported German and Japanese civilian casualties in the same detail and with the same sympathy they report Palestinian civilian casualties in Gaza, it is doubtful that the Nazis and the Japanese militarists would have lost that war. Certainly, at the very least, the anti-Nazi, anti-Fascist war effort would have been severely compromised.

The analogy is entirely apt. Hamas is on the same moral level as the two World War II enemies. Do those who condemn Israel for its attacks on Hamas fighters that have tragically resulted in hundreds of civilian Palestinian deaths also condemn the Allied bombings of German and Japanese military targets that resulted in far more civilian deaths? I suspect not since most critics of Israel still regard World War II as a moral war. The overriding issue, therefore, is whether fighting Hamas is moral. If it is, then the unintended death of Palestinian civilians is a tragedy, not an evil (except on the part of Hamas, because it situates its fighters and its missiles among civilians, including schools).

Third, if Hamas had the same ability to bomb Israel as Israel has to bomb Gaza, would the number of Jewish civilians be in the hundreds? Or would there be the Holocaust in Israel that Hamas and its Iranian sponsors dream of? The answer is so obvious that this consideration alone renders moral Israels war to destroy Hamas. In a short period of time Hamas will have more accurate missiles and longer-range ones. One of them could kill a thousand or more. Another one could destroy passenger planes coming into Ben-Gurion Airport, thereby causing foreign airlines to stop flying into Israel. It is that inevitability that Israel is fighting to prevent. But in the morally confused world we live in, only with thousands of Israelis dead, would Israels invasion of Gaza be proportional, and therefore acceptable. But Israel is more interested in living with world condemnation than in dying with world sympathy.

Source

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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

****************************

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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