STRAIGHT OUTTA’ DENVER

Wale is not a delicious meat. You shouldn’t eat it, because most people would consider that cannibalism due to the fact that you’re fucking huge. It’d be like me saying “Yeah, they don’t have laws in Japan about peopling, but I understand because people are delicious.”
Wales are awesome. You’re not.
Fuck you,
Sam

5 comments.

A journey into the political ideas of Distinguished Bean… (Compare/Contrast with the Congressman from Texas)

Posted on January 17th, 2009 by Distinguished Bean.
Categories: Political, Abortion, War, Law, Constitutional Law, Terrorism, education, Economics.

When i began to develop politically, morally, and economically, i took on specific views on most of the issues spanning the political spectrum of today. I began to take stances and apply my own intellect onto the issues, however, something was weird. I was raised old fashioned Republican and thought it was faultless, however, when i began my journey i began to contradict myself and confuse my past. My views didn’t fit one political party, let alone a single frame of thought. I suddenly realized that there was a party out there that, for the most part, was saying what i was thinking. However, even then, i felt very confused. Suddenly i read and studied the history and ideas of the 10 term congressman Ron Paul from Texas. I was absolutely amazed on how much i lined up with his political thoughts. I truly and honestly believe that if people could step past party boundaries, politicians like him, who actually thought ‘outside the box’ , would have a chance at positively influencing the country. I have recently read his book Revolution: A Manifesto. I felt like he did an incredible job of covering the issues pressing our nation today, so i have decided to post brief summaries that i found on the site http://www.ontheissues.org/Revolution_Manifesto.htm, that sum up his views and political thought.

Abortion is murder
A popular academic argument for abortion demands that we think of the child in the womb as a parasite.but the same argument justifies infanticide, since it applies just as well to an infant outside the womb.newborns require even more attention & care.

People ask an expectant mother how her baby is doing. They do not ask how her fetus is doing, or her blob of tissue, or her parasite. But that is what her baby becomes as soon as the child is declared to be unwanted.
Source: The Revolution: A Manifesto, by Ron Paul, p. 59-60 Apr 1, 2008

Roe v. Wade decision was harmful to the Constitution
The federal government should not play any role in the abortion issue, according to the Constitution. Apart from waiting forever for Supreme Court justices who rule in accordance with the Constitution, Americans do have some legislative recourse. Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution gives Congress the power to strip the federal courts of jurisdiction over a broad categories of cases.

Wasteful government spending backed by both parties
Truth is treason in the empire of lies. There is an alternative to national bankruptcy, a bigger police state, trillion dollar wars, and a government that draws ever more parasitically on the productive energies of the American people. It’s called freedom.

School prayer is not a federal issue
[Limits on Constitutional authority] holds true for issues like prayer in schools. Such issues were never meant to be decided by federal judges. The whole point of the American Revolution was to vindicate the principle of local self government.
Source: The Revolution: A Manifesto, by Ron Paul, p. 61 Apr 1, 2008

Private funds for arts work better than government funds
Some Americans appear to believe that there would be no arts in America were it not for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). While the government requested $121 million for the NEA in 2006, private donations to the arts totaled $2.5 billion that year, dwarfing the NEA budget. NEA funds go not necessarily to the best artists, but to people who happen to be good at filling out government grant applications. I have my doubts that the same people populate both categories.

Free trade agreements threaten national sovereignty
I opposed both the North American Free Trade Agreement and the World Trade Organization, both of which were heavily favored by the political establishment. Many supporters of the free trade market supported these agreements. Nearly six decades ago when the International Trade Organization was up for debate, conservatives and libertarians agreed that supranational trade bureaucracies with the power to infringe upon American sovereignty were undesirable.

The “living Constitution” is the death of democracy
A living Constitution is just the thing any government would be delighted to have, for whenever people complain that their constitution has been violated, the government can trot out its judges to inform the people that they’ve simply misunderstood: the Constitution, you see, has merely evolved with the times.

Those who would give us a ‘living’ constitution are actually giving us a dead constitution, since such a thing is completely unable to protect us against encroachments of government power.

Replace Medicaid with volunteer pro-bono medical care
In the days before Medicare and Medicaid, the poor and elderly were admitted to hospitals at the same rate they are now, and received good care. Before those programs came into existence, every physician understood that he or she had a responsibility towards the less fortunate and free medical care was the norm. Hardly anyone is aware of this today, since it doesn’t fit into the typical, by the script story of government rescuing us from a predatory private sector.
Source: The Revolution: A Manifesto, by Ron Paul, p. 84 Apr 1, 2008

Private medical savings accounts, not government meddling
The most obvious way to break this cycle is to get the government out of the business of meddling in health care, which was far more affordable and accessible before government got involved. Short of that, and more politically feasible in the immediate run, is to allow consumers and their doctors to pull themselves out of the system through medical savings accounts.
Source: The Revolution: A Manifesto, by Ron Paul, p. 89 Apr 1, 2008

Conscription is unconstitutional–including National Service
Nowhere in the Constitution is the federal government given the power to conscript citizens. The power to raise armies is not a power to force people into the armies.

Lesser forms of the draft, such as compulsory “national service” are based on the sam unacceptable premise. Young people are not raw material to be employed by the political class on behalf of whatever fashionable political, military, or social cause catches its fancy. In a free society, their lives are not the plaything of government.

Contract with America was a toothless cop out
The Republican leadership urged these freshmen congressmen to focus on a toothless, soporific agenda called the Contract with America that was boldly touted as a major overhaul of the federal government. Nothing could have been further from the truth. The Brookings Institution in effect said that if this is what conservatives consider revolutionary, they have conceded defeat.
Source: The Revolution: A Manifesto, by Ron Paul, p. 3 Apr 1, 2008

11/5/07: Set fundraising record of $4 million in single day
I was a reluctant candidate, not at all convinced that a sizable enough national constituency existed for a campaign based on liberty and the Constitution rather than on special interest pandering and the distribution of loot. Was I ever wrong.

On November 5, 2007, we set a record when we raised over $4 million online in a single day. Not only is the freedom message popular, it is more intensely popular than any other political message.

Terrorism is just like any other murder: you look for motive
People were bound to start wondering eventually, why we were attacked? Not because they sought to excuse the attackers, but out of natural curiosity regarding what made these men tick. Looking for motive is not the same thing as making excuses; detectives always look for motive behind crime, but no one thinks they are looking to excuse murder.
Source: The Revolution: A Manifesto, by Ron Paul, p. 15 Apr 1, 2008

War in Iraq was senseless invasion of sovereign state
The war in Iraq was one of the most ill considered, poorly planned and just plain unnecessary military conflicts in American history.and I opposed it from the beginning.
Source: The Revolution: A Manifesto, by Ron Paul, p. 21 Apr 1, 2008

Mandate declaration of war before military aggression
In 2002, as war with Iraq loomed, I proposed that Congress officially declare war against Iraq, making it clear that I intended to oppose my own measure. The point was to underscore our constitutional responsibility to declare war before commencing major military operations, rather than leaving the decision to the President or passing resolutions that delegate to the president the decision making power over war.

And finally, due to the recent heat of the conflict in Israel/Palestine, i have found an excerpt from a speech he made concerning the conflict.

“collective punishment” against Palestinians is immoral.

“Many innocent children are among the dead. While the shooting of rockets into Israel is inexcusable, the violent actions of some people in Gaza does not justify killing Palestinians on this scale,” said the outspoken Republican.

Israel launched Operation Cast Lead on December 27 against Gaza to put an end to rocket attacks launched from the coastal enclave.

At least 888 Palestinians have been killed during the Israeli operation, while some 3,700 others are reported wounded. At least 10 Israeli soldiers have died in the now 16-day onslaught.

Hamas, the democratically-elected ruler of the impoverished strip, demands a cessation of an 18-month Israeli blockade on Gaza before it stops rocket attacks on Israel.

The US Congress endorsed a resolution Friday to support Israel in its offensive in Gaza, “recognizing Israel’s right to defend itself against attacks from Gaza.”

Congressman Paul, however, says the resolution “clearly takes one side in a conflict that has nothing to do with the United States or US interests.”

“At the very least, the U.S. Congress should not be loudly proclaiming its support for the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza,” Paul added.

The Israeli operation has entered its third week now, despite international calls and a UN Security Council resolution which urge an immediate end to the attacks against the densely-populated strip.

0 comments.

A letter to the Pacifist Muse.

Posted on January 15th, 2009 by Darth B'strad.
Categories: Political, War, Terrorism, Philosophy, Islam, Judaism, Israel, Religon, Christianity, Palestine, Cultural.

As the title would suggest, this is mainly written to P. muse so as to bring comfort and understanding but also to clarify to the best of my ability what really is going on with Israel today. As soon as I read an e-mail sent out by P. muse that was nearly the same as his latest post I urged him to lay it all out here so that we as a community can see and understand what it is he’s been going through. As Paul tells in his first letter to the Corinthians “If one part suffers, all the parts suffer with it, and if one part is honored, all the parts are glad.” (12:26) I see that your suffering here P. muse so I urged you to place it up here so that we could all bring comfort and prayers in his time of need. So please do bring prayers on behalf of P muse and also for peace in Israel. This is certainly proving to be trying times in that region and it has had me rethinking a lot of my believes towards Israel but I know that the Palestinians hold a special place in your heart as they should. But we all need to remember that we all need each other here and when a bother is suffering we need to lift him up. You all have done the some for me and now it’s my turn to lift up a brother in Christ. So I’m sure you’ll all be interested and I’m sure that Bear will get a kick out of it but here’s my letter to P. Muse:

My brother: your exactly right! Looking at the situation as it exists today, this is completely unacceptable! What did we immediately say when Russia started blowing the crap out of little Georgia (the country Georgia not the state south of Carolina)? We started condemning them immediately! Well I did, Invot still has his arguments but they don’t matter for the purpose of this letter :P. But just as you spelled out in your latest post, it looks like the oppressed have become the oppressors! Just looking at what they have been doing over the past few years, like building walls to hold in the Palestinians and such things, just are the sort of things that we’ll find unacceptable in these days from a devolved nation. Going through and shooting down aid ships trying to help the starving and hurting people in Gaza is something that we never do! Why would we allow Israel to do it? It’s starting to be a really strange set of circumstances where we are starting to support a state that just throws all caution to the wind and start to blow things away just because their angry. Now you’ll get the argument “well if we had rockets shot off over our border wouldn’t we get angry?” Well, of course we would! We’d go kick some butt! But unlike what Israel is doing, we also have the tendency to rebuild that country we destroy and leave it in a place of peace and prosperity so that we won’t have to deal with any more attacks from that country. We’ve rebuilt Germany and Japan, and depending on Obama, we’ll also be leaving Iraq and Afghanistan in places of peace and prosperity or at least that’s what we were trying to do. But on the other hand you have Israel, who’s walling up the people they don’t like rather than actually making peace for them, and they’re treating them like dogs! Can we really that it’s all right for the Israelis to go ahead and keep fighting this war of attrition and completely starve out the Palestinians from the land that they have lived in for generations? What would that be saying of us? Just because your granpa went though the Holocaust does not mean that you have a right to go shooting someone who had nothing to do with it. Didn’t Jeremiah say of his own people:

Jeremiah 3:19-20
“I thought to myself,
‘I would love to treat you as my own children!’
I wanted nothing more than to give you this beautiful land—
the finest possession in the world.
I looked forward to your calling me ‘Father,’
and I wanted you never to turn from me.
But you have been unfaithful to me, you people of Israel!
You have been like a faithless wife who leaves her husband.
I, the Lord, have spoken.”

So what really has changed with the Jews? They’re still acting this way! They’re still doing the same evil acts that they were back in the day of Jeremiah! Didn’t Isaiah tell us:

Isaiah 5:8
What sorrow for you who buy up house after house and field after field,
until everyone is evicted and you live alone in the land.

Humm, What are the Israelis doing today? Evicting the Palestinians so that no one else lives there! Yea, their still doing the same things that they always have been doing for thousands of years. And all their doing is just invoking more and more wraith upon themselves! What they are doing is for one, wrong and two, not working! So are we really to be supporting this? NO!

I remember going to Israel awareness day back in 2005 or so, down at that maga-church, and going to listen to Denis Pager speak about Israel, and it was a good speech. There where alternating Israeli and American flags hung up on the ceiling, and he just started out by taking about how these two flags belonged together. It was just an amazing sight to see, one of the men I looked up to as a mentor in my growing up and learning how to think rationally in this world, it just felt like the place for me to be! And I still do look up to and admire Pager a lot! He has certainly helped bring me out of a dark and dismal period of my life by his theories that he came up with on happiness. Something that I have tested and proven to be true in my own life, but now I have to part company with this line of thinking. Not out of anger at him or others that hold his positions, and I still very much look up to thous that still do hold these positions. But to sanction the mass killings without some sort of cause and vision to at least build up a society that is open and truly free, is just something that I can no longer do. I can’t say that it’s alright for the Israelis to go ahead and just imprison a large group of people without some sort of means to rebuild and make a new life for themselves. They’re not trying to make these people part of a greater society that holds equality as a value, but they are enslaving a group of people in certain towns. I can’t agree with that!

Now having said all that, your call “that the rouge state of Israel be brought to justice and swiftly dissolved for being the racist” is just not possible at this time nor do I support that idea ether. We also have to remember that there is an evil side to the Palestinian cause as well and to dissolve the state of Israel would just be switching roles. At this time there is no possible way for us to dissolve the state of Israel without massive blood shed of Israelis and displacement from their homes because there is a group of people in the Palestinian camp who also wish to kill off all of the Jew as well. And you can’t deny this fact as well. They are locked in mutual hatred of each other and they will continue to fight this war, unfortunately I think, until God decides to intercede here. We have two sides of different faiths fighting out a holy war here and our fellow brothers and sisters in Christ are getting cut up in the middle. And just like you, I am very heart broken over these turn of events, as we should. We should not accept this situation as it is and there is plenty of blame to go around. But while there is a burning of hatred going on around this whole region, I beg you to please, don’t let your heart to get too hard. You were a big part of helping me to find my way and calling, please let me be that brother to you as well. I still think that this rouge state will have a part to play in the grand story that is being written. Paul tell us in Romans:

Romans 11:19-21
“Well,” you may say, “those branches were broken off to make room for me.” Yes, but remember—those branches were broken off because they didn’t believe in Christ, and you are there because you do believe. So don’t think highly of yourself, but fear what could happen. For if God did not spare the original branches, he won’t spare you either.

So while the Jews are broken and lost branches, we were also broken and lost branches. And God very much wants them to be grafted back into His tree of life as well as the rest of us. So don’t let your experiences start to also make you hard as well. That’s something that we all have to deal with and by the grace of God, He gave me such an amazing friend as you to help me along through my darkest periods in my life. Keep on loving the Lord your God with all your mind, your heart and your strength and He will bless you for it. He will bring you though your most difficult times so keep Him close and never let go. It might just be that the Palestinian Christians are just the first who are going to go through a suffering that we will all have to endure. So really the only bit of advice that I can give to them is:

Romans 13:1-3
Everyone must submit to governing authorities. For all authority comes from God, and those in positions of authority have been placed there by God. So anyone who rebels against authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and they will be punished. For the authorities do not strike fear in people who are doing right, but in those who are doing wrong. Would you like to live without fear of the authorities? Do what is right, and they will honor you.

I know that’s easy for me to say when I’m not the one getting my home taken away and getting shot at, but if we support each other, I believe that we will also keep true to our principals when it’s our time of persecution. I’ll tell you to remember the words that God told me Himself when I started moving into my recent dark period: “Don’t worry my son, I AM still in control.” I know that it just doesn’t look possible right now but what Isaiah said will come to pass:

Isaiah 2:4
The Lord will mediate between nations
and will settle international disputes.
They will hammer their swords into plowshares
and their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation will no longer fight against nation,
nor train for war anymore.

That day is still coming and we are still looking and working towards that day, and when it comes there will be much rejoicing for we will be vindicated by our faith in Jesus.

I love you
Your Brother and Fellow bondsmen in Christ
Bryan Federowicz

2 comments.

Intifada in the Gaza Ghetto

Posted on January 14th, 2009 by Pacifist Muse.
Categories: Ethics, War, Terrorism, Israel, Palestine.

Gentlemen, here’s my latest overly serious post on Palestine. One day I will start writing about something else. Someday.

On January 18th 1943 Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, surrounded by walls, and living under crippling restrictions imposed by Nazi forces engaged themselves in an uprising that would last until May 16th in the same year. The poorly armed and ill-supplied Jewish forces staged heavy resistance against the modern war machines of the SS. While the Nazi SS claims to have suffered only 16 casualties; history has surmised that in reality SS casualties were much higher.

In the end the courageous Jewish resistance was deflated as the Nazi troops resorted to indiscriminate burning of houses. Of the nearly 13,000 Jews that were killed in just three months of fighting at least 6,000 died in the house fires or from smoke inhalation. Thus, over 40% percent of those killed in the Ghetto uprising were not killed because they were engaged in resistance but rather by nature of the fact that they happened to be in or around the houses that the Nazis were indiscriminately fire bombing in order to root out the “sub-human” Jewish resistance forces. Considering that the Nazis’ claim that they suffered just 16 casualties is suspected to be a heavily doctored number, it seems likely that, as it was published by the Polish Underground State, in fact their were at least 200 German casualties. Thus, the brutal Nazi Forces killed roughly 65 times more Jews then they suffered casualties. About half the Jews that were killed were engaged in active resistance, while the others were simply living in the Ghetto and found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Nazi justification for the ghettos in the first place and then the ensuing brutality against the already impoverished ghetto inhabitants was the idea of Jews as a dangerous and polluting people who were locked up in ghettos for the good of Germans and indeed the good of the world. Jewish resistance was twisted and contorted and reconstructed by the Nazis as sub-human terrorism while the Nazi brutality was constructed in the macabre logic of Nazism as defensive in spite of the heavy disproportionately in those killed and the reality that the Jews who rose up in rebellion were doing so in a ghetto!

When people are rounded up in ghettos and denied basic life-sustaining goods they will in time resist. And resist they should.

Aside from enormous power imbalance introduced by the Nazi’s heavily superior military weaponry the Warsaw Ghetto suppression was so successful related to the number of Jewish collaborators the Nazi’s had coerced into feeding them information about the Jewish resistance movement. As the massacres took place the Allied forces did little to nothing to stop the Nazis. Szmul Zygielbojm, who was the leader of the Jewish socialist party called the Bund wrote in suicide letter that:

“The latest news that has reached us from Poland makes it clear beyond any doubt that the Germans are now murdering the last remnants of the Jews in Poland with unbridled cruelty. Behind the walls of the ghetto the last act of this tragedy is now being played out.

The responsibility for the crime of the murder of the whole Jewish nationality in Poland rests first of all on those who are carrying it out, but indirectly it falls also upon the whole of humanity, on the peoples of the Allied nations and on their governments, who up to this day have not taken any real steps to halt this crime. By looking on passively upon this murder of defenseless millions, tortured children, women and men they have become partners to the responsibility …”
(Quote By Joseph Massad, http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10110.shtml)

In the last 11 days of fighting in the Gaza Ghetto Uprising nearly 700 Palestinians have been killed and nearly 3,000 have been wounded (many of which are expected to succumb to their wounds because of an acute lack of medical supplies and space in Gazan hospitals). Medical sources in Gaza are saying that the casualties are at least 50% civilians. As high as 30% of the casualties may be children under 10 years old. Today, a UN school was shelled twice by Israeli tanks causing over 40 deaths and dozens more wounded. In last few days whole families have been killed in their houses. In once case Israel bombed a mosque it said was a “stronghold” for Hamas. As it turned out five young girls, sisters, were in the mosque after having fled their home. The only video evidence Israel has released which they did as “proof” of their targeting Palestinian resistance fighters turned out to be a 14 year old boy and other men loading oxygen tanks onto a pickup.

Palestinian resistance has been twisted and contorted and reconstructed by the Israelis as sub-human terrorism while the Israeli brutality has been constructed in the macabre logic of Zionism as defensive in spite of the heavy disproportionality of those killed and the reality that the Palestinians who have risen up in resistance are doing so in a ghetto!

Since the beginning of the Israeli invasion of the Gaza ghetto, 4 Israeli civilians have been killed by rocket fire and at least 6 soldiers have been killed. Israel has been using phosphorous bombs in crowded civilian areas (bombs that explode in the air and shower thousands of bits of burning phosphorous that burns through flesh and bone in seconds and is considered a war crime if used in civilian areas). Israel has also been using radioactive Dense Inert Metal Explosives (DIME) bombs. “DIME bombs produce an unusually powerful blast within a relatively small area, spraying a superheated “micro-shrapnel” of powdered Heavy Metal Tungsten Alloy (HMTA). Scientific studies have found that HMTA is chemically toxic, damages the immune system, rapidly causes cancer, and attacks DNA
(genotoxic).<4-11>” (http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103×414058)
The weapon was developed by the US and sold to Israel. What is taking place in the Gaza ghetto is a massacre that equals and even so far exceeds the Nazis massacre of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto.

If Israel were to keep up her pace for as long as the Warsaw Ghetto uprising lasted–three months–roughly 6,300 Palestinians will be killed and over 27,000 wounded (many if not most of which will succumb to their wounds as a result of the fact that conditions in Gazan hospitals, if they are not bombed, look only to get more dire). This reality puts potential Palestinian casualties at well over the 13,000 that were killed in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, if even a third of the potential Palestinian wounded succumb to their wounds, which seems tragically likely. If Israeli casualties remain at the same rate they have been at there will be about 90 dead at the end of the three months. Thus if things continue we are looking at over 15,000 Palestinian deaths and a Israeli disproportionality rate of 170-1, a rate that makes the Nazis 65-1 in the Warsaw ghetto look mild. Even now the Israeli massacre in Gaza is running at nearly 70-1, already proportionally worse than the Nazis’ suppression of the Jewish uprising in 1943.

It may seem sick to engage in such theoretical projections (and God knows I pray each day that things will not carry on this long or with the ferocity that we have seen so far) but I believe it is important to put this mass killing in historical perspective.

The sick thing about what is happening now is Gaza, is that like in the case of the Warsaw Ghetto, the Israelis have enlisted their own judenrat collaborationist government–the PCA (Palestinian Collaborationist Authority)–in their program to root out Hamas. The PCA in the West Bank has actually been on the verge of violently breaking up Palestinian demonstrations in solidarity with the Gazans. I fully expect their to be a Fatah invasion of Gaza following the Israeli massacre. Indeed I wouldn’t be surprised if Mahmoud Abbas had foreknowledge of the invasion of Gaza and may already have plans for taking Gaza over after the mass killing.

Yet as Joseph Massad wrote recently in an Electronic Intifada article:

“The crushing of the Gaza Ghetto Uprising and the slaughter of its defenseless population will be relatively an easy task for the giant Israeli military machine and Israel’s sadistic political leadership. It is dealing with the aftermath of a strengthened Palestinian determination to continue to resist Israel that will prove much more difficult for Israel and its Arab allies to deal with. While the thousands of dead and injured Palestinians are the main victims of this latest Israeli terrorist war, the major political loser in all this will be Abbas and his clique of collaborators. The test for Palestinian resistance now is to continue to refuse to grant Israel the right to conquer populations, to steal their land, to destroy their livelihoods, to imprison them in ghettos, and to starve them without being resisted.

The only constant in Palestinian lives for the last century of Zionist atrocities has been resistance to the Zionist project of erasing them from the face of the earth. While Zionism sought and recruited Arab and Palestinian collaborators since its inception in the hope of crushing Palestinian resistance, neither Israel nor any of its collaborators has been able to stop it. The lesson that Zionism has refused to learn, and still refuses to learn, is that the Palestinian yearning for freedom from the Zionist yoke cannot be extinguished no matter how barbaric Israel’s crimes become. The Gaza Ghetto Uprising will mark both the latest chapter in Palestinian resistance to colonialism and the latest Israeli colonial brutality in a region whose peoples will never accept the legitimacy of a racist European colonial settlement in their midst.”

(Joseph Massad, http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10110.shtml)

Please do what you can, in demonstration, in boycotts, in resistance in Palestine, and in prayer on behalf of the people of Gaza.

To see Massad’s article go here:
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10110.shtml

Here are some links:
http://www.endtheoccupation.org/
http://www.bdsmovement.net/
http://www.vtjp.org/
http://electronicintifada.net/

Along with the vast majority of the world’s people and nearly none of the world’s governments: I look forward to and pray that the state of Israel is swiftly dissolved out of existence. I hope and pray that not one drop of Jewish-Israeli blood is spilled in the process and equally that not one Israeli-Jew be displaced from their homes but it is time that the rouge state of Israel be brought to justice and swiftly dissolved for being the racist, apartheid state that it is.

In mourning,

13 comments.

Things are blowing up in Israel, Again!

Posted on December 30th, 2008 by Darth B'strad.
Categories: Political, Ethics, War, Terrorism, Islam, Judaism, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Religon, Palestine.

It’s actually quite strange that the American media had to take several days to analyze the situation but they eventually did. P. muse has been on top of the bombings Israel just committed and sent this article around form electronicintifada.net:

“I will play music and celebrate what the Israeli air force is doing.” Those were the words, spoken on Al Jazeera today by Ofer Shmerling, an Israeli civil defense official in the Sderot area adjacent to Gaza, as images of Israel’s latest massacres were broadcast around the world.

Hey Israel! When Al Jazeera is praising you, that’s not a good thing!

A short time earlier, US-supplied Israeli F-16 warplanes and Apache helicopters dropped over 100 bombs on dozens of locations in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip killing at least 195 persons and injuring hundreds more. Many of these locations were police stations located, like police stations the world over, in the middle of civilian areas. The US government was one of the first to offer its support for Israel’s attacks, and others will follow.

Reports said that many of the dead were Palestinian police officers. Among those Israel labels “terrorists” were more than a dozen traffic police officers undergoing training. An as yet unknown number of civilians were killed and injured; Al Jazeera showed images of several dead children, and the Israeli attacks came at the time thousands of Palestinian children were in the streets on their way home from school.

Shmerling’s joy has been echoed by Israelis and their supporters around the world; their violence is righteous violence. It is “self-defense” against “terrorists” and therefore justified. Israeli bombing — like American and NATO bombing in Iraq and Afghanistan — is bombing for freedom, peace and democracy.

The rationalization for Israel’s massacres, already being faithfully transmitted by the English-language media, is that Israel is acting in “retaliation” for Palestinian rockets fired with increasing intensity ever since the six-month truce expired on 19 December (until today, no Israeli had been killed or injured by these recent rocket attacks).

But today’s horrific attacks mark only a change in Israel’s method of killing Palestinians recently. In recent months they died mostly silent deaths, the elderly and sick especially, deprived of food and necessary medicine by the two year-old Israeli blockade calculated and intended to cause suffering and deprivation to 1.5 million Palestinians, the vast majority refugees and children, caged into the Gaza Strip. In Gaza, Palestinians died silently, for want of basic medications: insulin, cancer treatment, products for dialysis prohibited from reaching them by Israel.

What the media never question is Israel’s idea of a truce. It is very simple. Under an Israeli-style truce, Palestinians have the right to remain silent while Israel starves them, kills them and continues to violently colonize their land. Israel has not only banned food and medicine to sustain Palestinian bodies in Gaza but it is also intent on starving minds: due to the blockade, there is not even ink, paper and glue to print textbooks for schoolchildren.

That article continues on painting an even grimmer picture of Israel’s bombing, and assuming that it’s true, then Israel is guilty of some serous war crimes here. Being a former conservative, I would have most certainly rationalized Israel’s attack as a necessary loss to get as the enemies that they face. And there is still some truth to that statement but with how much that Israel keeps everyone in the dark about what they’re trying to do, you really can’t know all of the truth of the situation. But it does seem that Israel tried to explain themselves here but were cut off. This from commentarymagazine.com:

Yesterday, the IDF did something innovative: it opened a channel on YouTube and posted videos to it that help explain why Israel is fighting Hamas. The site hosted about a dozen videos showing things like Israeli humanitarian aid deliveries to Gaza and airstrikes that prevented terrorists from firing rockets at Israeli civilians.

This was apparently too much for YouTube, which moments ago removed several videos from the IDF’s channel, including the most-watched video, which showed a group of Hamas goons being blown up in an air strike as they loaded Katyusha missiles onto a truck. The point of such footage, as if it needed to be said, is not to revel in violence — it is to show the legitimacy of Israeli self-defense.

The rank double-standard that YouTube has applied to Israel is disturbing. YouTube hosts all manner of similar footage — much of it far more gory than the grainy infrared images posted by the IDF — of U.S. air strikes. Why is YouTube capitulating to those who do not wish for Israel to be able to tell its side of the story?

So this does get even more complicated just due to the fact that there are interests in hiding the truth in our media. There are many interest groups in portraying Israel in the worst light possible or in the best light possible. So it’s hard to really know what is accurate here but ironically enough here the New Republic actually does have the best analysis:

It was Israel at its best. In response to random attacks aimed at its civilians, Israel launched precise attacks aimed at terrorists. In place of political schism, Israel suspended election campaigning, and initiated coooperation between government and opposition. Instead of illusions about an imminent peace agreement with Bashar Assad or about half a negotiated peace agreement with half of the Palestinian leadership, we exhibited sobriety and a willingness to defend ourselves. And instead of military confusion and ineptitude, as we displayed in Lebanon two years ago, we showed the most impressive display of our intelligence, air power, and psychological warfare in decades.

But what’s next? Here are some of the possible consequences to watch for in the coming days and weeks.

So for a paper that been praising Obama like crazy, they just move in on supporting Israel. I thought Obama was suppose to keep them under control?

Israel’s Options: There are three possible scenarios for how this operation will evolve. The first is that the government will opt for a limited attack whose goal isn’t the overthrow of the Hamas regime but merely the attainment of better terms in the next round of ceasefire–such as supervision over tunnels linking Gaza with Egypt and through which Hamas has smuggled in missiles. The argument for a limited operation is that Mahmud Abbas’s men aren’t ready to secure the Strip from Hamas–and even if they were, they would bear the mark of collaborators if they took control of Gaza courtesy of Israel.

The second scenario is the overthrow of Hamas and turning the Strip over to a foreign power–ideally Egypt, as the Palestinian Authority’s chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, has suggested. It’s doubtful, though, that Egypt will agree to relieve Israel of its Gaza burden. And NATO is on record as refusing to commit peacekeeping troops in the Palestinian territories.

The third option is to begin with the first option of a limited operation but, as fighting intensifies, find ourselves reluctantly implementing the second option of all-out war against Hamas. That may well be the least desirable option of all, leaving Israel vulnerable to events beyond its control. But given previous Israeli experience, that could be the most likely scenario.

The Iranian Bomb: The countdown to a nuclear Iran is now being measured in months rather than years. Few here in Israel believe that President Obama’s diplomatic efforts will succeed; and if those efforts fail, there won’t be enough time to galvanize the international community to adopt effective sanctions. The danger of the current conflict in Gaza, then, is that Israel will be too preoccupied with fighting Hamas and perhaps Hezbollah to effectively respond to the Iranian threat.

The Gaza conflict, though, could also have the opposite effect, especially if the IDF loses focus and finds itself immersed yet again in a no-win battle. Israeli policymakers may begin asking themselves what the point is of fighting Iran’s proxies every few years rather than confronting Iran itself, especially given the urgency of stopping a nuclear Iran.

The Fate of a Two-State Solution: The future of the West Bank may well be resolved in Gaza. If the international community forces the IDF to end the operation before the missile threat against southern Israel is resolved, Israelis will inevitably conclude that, even when we withdraw to the 1967 borders, as we did on the Gaza front in 2005, the international community will not allow us to protect ourselves. And the likelihood then of convincing a majority of Israelis to withdraw from the West Bank–within easy rocket distance from our major population centers–will be close to non-existent. Ultimately, then, the creation of an independent Palestine depends on neutralizing Hamas.

The Moderate Arab Response: About six months ago, during a meeting with a senior Palestinian official, I was stunned when he asked me matter of factly, “So when are you Israelis going to invade Gaza already?” “You mean you want us to?” I asked. “If you want a peace agreement,” he replied, “you will have no choice.” I never expected that position to be made public. But some Arab leaders–including Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and even the feckless Abbas–have both come as close as any Arab leader can dare go in expressing support for the Israeli attack by condemning Hamas for inviting it.

In the 1990s, there was hope that a “new Middle East” would emerge through peace talks. For Israel, that turned out to be a near-fatal illusion. Now, though, a new Middle East may actually be emerging–not through peace but conflict. And in this new Middle East, moderate Arabs are siding with Israel against Iran and its proxies. That is the reason why several Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia, condemned Hezbollah rather than Israel in the initial phase of the Second Lebanon War. And it’s the reason why most of the Arab world failed to condemn Israel’s air strike last year against the Syrian nuclear reactor–intended, according to one intelligence report, as an eventual nuclear bomb factory for Iran.

In the interest of not making this post way too long I’ll cut to the end of the article:

As I am writing this article, a ground operation appears imminent. That may be necessary to prevent Hamas from firing rockets at southern Israel, but it will also result in growing casualties in Gaza. And that will increase international pressure against Israel and undermine the Israeli domestic consensus on which the success of the operation depends. The Israeli Zionist left, which so far supports the government, has resricted its backing to a limited operation. We still don’t know what the government wants to achieve, and what the army believes is achievable. What constitutes victory? Will we know how to translate military success into political gain? Will the government be strong enough to resist world pressure, even in the event of a disastrous accident that results in Palestinian civilian casualties? Most of all, what’s required is patience, and the realization among Israelis and our friends abroad that this battle is part of the larger war against jihadism that shifts from one part of the world to the other, and whose outcome will define our generation.

But I find it really funny that this one comes out supporting Israel. While I do see Iran a major threat to us and the rest of the world, especially as they complete a nuclear bomb and can be a helpful as an ally in that region. However on the other hand, Israel is becoming exactly like the people that they hate! They’re starting to shoot down any aid that comes to Gaza and are starving them out. Is this indiscriminate killing really helping their cause? P. muse is calling for us to contact our congressmen to protest these chain of events. I’ll give you the link here, but I don’t have any faith that it will change anything. The real solution is to have Israel to cease all operations and allow us to take over the situation along with some sort of solution to Iran to get at the heart of the problem. But theirs no will left in the American people. So with Israels excessive force and the Palestinians desire to destroy Israel, were looking at a middle east that is just going to continue to get more and more bloody. I pray that Obama will have the wisdom to do what is right here.

6 comments.

Palin, Clinton, Ahmadinejad, The Financial Collapse and God

Posted on September 27th, 2008 by Darth B'strad.
Categories: Political, Ethics, Party System, War, Terrorism, Philosophy, Media, Republicans, Democrats, Iran, Israel, Religon, Christianity, Economics.

As the title and the number of categories suggest, this is going to be a lengthy post for me pulling a lot of subjects together. But bare with me here I’ll wrap it all together here to one good point and I’ll even slap on a really nice pretty bow on top of it! However I first have to start with the bad news here (and there never seems to be any end to bad news this year!) Our country is going into a state of chaos. It’s becoming more and more apparent as the days go by and there seems to be no way to reverse the irrational thinking that is going all across the board. We’re getting griped with fear here and it’s starting to create a real panic in our country. As I have been on the charge against for two years (more or less) here on this blog this panic and fear is being created by a Victimhood mentality thats sinking it’s teeth deep within our culture even in our very souls. We’ve grown too accustomed to quick dismissals of people and their ideas and hold too tightly to our doomsday scenarios that it’s starting to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we continue on this course then we will deserve the chaos that will follow. We have three primary causes to this downward spiral that we’re entering into: extreme partisanship, foolish finical decision making and lack of trust in God.

Extreme Partisanship
I’m pro partisan! I want people to take their convictions seriously and stand up on them to pronounce them to the best of their ability to as many people as possible. I love debate and intellectualism of any side! But at a certain point too much partisanship turns things sour. That happens when winning the election becomes more important than standing on your convictions. Haaretz has a great piece illustrating this point perfectly:

In the speech which Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin was to have delivered at a Monday rally protesting the UN appearance of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, she was to have said that the Iranian president “dreams of being an agent in a ‘Final Solution’ - the elimination of the Jewish people.”

Her appearance in the rally in Dag Hammarskjold Plaza was cancelled in a flap between protest organizers and Hillary Clinton, who had also been scheduled to speak. Clinton aides were quoted as saying that they had been “blindsided” by the decision to invite Palin, which they called a partisan move. In the ensuing controversy, Clinton withdrew her participation, and Palin’s invitation was rescinded.

How often dose a paper publish a speech that a candidate would have made? Hillary was invited to this rally to stand firm on the principal that women are of equal value to men. Iran is the leading country in violation of that principal because that country has their secret police always out on the patrol and any woman who does not hold to their strict code of dress is wiped. Even more than that, they have every woman who is suspected of any promiscuous activity stoned. Sarah shares Hillary’s principal that we should fight this injustice and deal with the threat posed of Iran. So why did Hillary back out? Because for her, it’s more important to defeat conservatives like Sarah than it is to stand up for women’s rights. Why Would Haaretz publish Sarah’s would be speech at the rally? Because they know that Iran threatens them and while they are a liberal paper in Israel much more in line with Hillary than Sarah, they don’t want to be killed. Sarah made one serious mistake in her speech that she did not give:

Earlier this year, Senator Clinton said that “Iran is seeking nuclear weapons, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps is in the forefront of that” effort. Senator Clinton argued that part of our response must include stronger sanctions, including the designation of the IRGC as a terrorist organization. John McCain and I could not agree more.

Senator Clinton understands the nature of this threat and what we must do to confront it. This is an issue that should unite all Americans. Iran should not be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons. Period. And in a single voice, we must be loud enough for the whole world to hear: Stop Iran!
Only by working together, across national, religious, and political differences, can we alter this regime’s dangerous behavior. Iran has many vulnerabilities, including a regime weakened by sanctions and a population eager to embrace opportunities with the West. We must increase economic pressure to change Iran’s behavior.

Hillary’s real threat is not Iran but rather Sarah. The left hates conservatism not evil. We’re starting to see much more of this as this year rolls on. The accusations being thrown at Sarah are quite astonishing! A speech Hillary did attend, Alcee Hastings had this to say:

“If Sarah Palin isn’t enough of a reason for you to get over whatever your problem is with Barack Obama, then you damn well had better pay attention,” Rep. Alcee Hastings of Florida said at a panel about the shared agenda of Jewish and African-American Democrats Wednesday. Hastings, who is African-American, was explaining what he intended to tell his Jewish constituents about the presidential race. “Anybody toting guns and stripping moose don’t care too much about what they do with Jews and blacks. So, you just think this through,” Hastings added as the room erupted in laughter and applause.

That was brilliant! So you’re telling me that if you tote guns and go hunting for moose that automatically makes you anti-semitic and racist? And the race card keeps getting played all over the place! Dennis Prager has a great piece up where he chronicled many good examples of this:

Andrew Sullivan of (set ital) The Atlantic: (end ital) “White racism means that Obama needs more than a small but clear lead to win.”

Jack Cafferty of CNN: “The polls remain close. Doesn’t make sense … unless it’s race.”

Jacob Weisberg of (set ital) Newsweek and Slate: (end ital) “The reason Obama isn’t ahead right now is … the color of his skin. … If Obama loses, our children will grow up thinking of equal opportunity as a myth.”

Nicholas D. Kristof of (set ital) New York Times: (end ital) “Religious prejudice (against Obama) is becoming a proxy for racial prejudice.”

Gerald W. McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, in a speech to union workers: “Are you going to give up your house and your job and your children’s futures because he’s black?”

Similar comments have been made by Kansas’s Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, a Democrat, and by writers in (set ital) Time (end ital) magazine. And according to The Associated Press: “A poll conducted by The Associated Press and Yahoo News, in conjunction with Stanford University, revealed that a fairly significant percentage of Democrats and independents may not vote for Sen. Barack Obama because of his race.” If you read the poll, it does not in fact suggest this conclusion. The pollsters assert that any person with any negative view of black life means that the person is racist and means that he would not vote for Obama. Both conclusions are unwarranted. But “Obama will lose because of racism” is how the poll takers and the media spin it.

Can you give me just one example of one mainstream conservitive that has said that he or she will not vote for Obama because he is black. Usually you’re much more loose with your words when you’re talking to someone who shares your politics but yet Prager has stated that he hasn’t received one e-mail saying “I just can’t vote for him because he’s black!” But it doesn’t matter, that charge will keep on getting thrown at us conservatives and it’s not going to stop no matter who gets elected. Funny to think that these people will charge us with racism if Obama looses but would they charge us with sexism if Sarah looses?

Why do liberals believe that if Obama loses it will be due to white racism?

One reason is the liberal elite’s contempt for white Americans with less education — even if they are Democrats.

A second reason is that it is inconceivable to most liberals that an Obama loss — especially a narrow one — will be due to Obama’s liberal views or inexperience or to admiration for John McCain.

The third reason is that the further left you go, the more insular you get. Americans on the left tend to talk only to one another; study only under left-wing teachers; and read only fellow leftists. That is why it is a shock to so many liberals when a Republican wins a national election — where do all these Republican voters come from? And that in turn explains why liberals ascribe Republican presidential victories to unfair election tactics (“Swift-boating” is the liberals’ reason for the 2004 Republican victory). In any fair election, Americans will see the left’s light.

If Obama loses, it will not be deemed plausible that Americans have again rejected a liberal candidate, indeed the one with the most liberal voting record in the U.S. Senate. Liberals will explain an Obama defeat as another nefarious Republican victory. Combining contempt for many rural and middle-class white Americans with a longstanding belief in the inevitability of a Democratic victory in 2008 (after all, everyone they talk to despises the Republicans and believes Republicans have led the country to ruin), there will be only one reason Obama did not win — white racism.

Conservatives keep on having lies thrown at us but the right is not immune to being so petty. Michel Savage is another talk show host on the fringes who regularly produces disgusting and hateful things towards the left. I haven’t listened to him in over 4 years but I bet he’s still out there and probably is worse than ever. Rush Limbaugh, a man I have listened to and respected since I was 5 or 6, is now becoming much more short tempered. He used to regularly have disagreeing calls first and try to work with them taking up a good portion of his hour trying to reason with them. but lately he’s starting to cut them off and shout them down. It’s gotten to the point that I just can’t listen to him anymore and his arrogance is just starting to drive him over the edge. The pig comment for Obama is another example where he said “if you put lipstick on a pig, it’s still a pig.” Hugh Hewitt came on and (paraphrasing) “You know what he meant there America. He’s calling Sarah a pig!” But come on now Hugh! We know the Obama’s not that stupid! You should have been going after the more truthful approach of saying that he’s out of touch with his audience because they started laughing before he finished the comment. But that’s my only complaint to Hugh he’s still doing an amazing doing the great work of political analysis but he’s still flirts with the line here and there. I’ve been impressed that Hugh as been sticking to his commitment that he’s only going to take first time female callers until they’re done talking to him due to Sarah’s nomination. Some of the women that he’s had calling has been very interesting. It seems that only Prager is really trying to keep things straight but just his voice is not enough. How did it ever get to the point that beating the other side is more important than doing what’s right for the country? It’s no wonder why people keep on tuning out of the politics and going to third parties because we’re getting into a real bitter constant nail bitting race where every single little bit of mud and every statement is analyzed to death. And you wonder why politicians seem so fake lately? It’s because everything they say is under the microscope for any little tiny defect. Both sides do it but I hear is far more often from the left then the right. This extreme partisanship has us disabled with all of the politicians on both sides trying not to let the other get the points for anything good or trying to shove down the bad stuff down the others troughs. That brings me to my next point.

Foolish Finical Decision Making
I’m a conservitive. So when a company makes a bad decisions and finds them selfs in over their heads they should go out of business and let others get into the market who will make good decisions. It’s simple stuff but it is all based around trust. The trust that when you take out a loan you’ll pay it back. This is how it’s worked for centuries and it’s worked the best out of any system that’s ever been introduced. However we’ve had a surge of people taking out loans that have no business getting them. Because congress didn’t like the fact that there were all these people who’ve never owned a home they started putting requirements on lenders to get these people in homes (of coure that was all in the name of compassion). That had the unintended consequence of lenders giveing out risky loans. But of course the housing market was in a boom! Prices were going up and while people were buying a lot of houses for much more than they could afford they just assumed that the price will continue to go up and they could just sell it, repay the loan and make a little money. Builders were seeing all of this money getting poured in, so hey, we need to get some houses built! But they built more houses than wee needed and as the law of supply and demand goes, when you have more supply than demand then the price goes down. So all the people who took out loans with the assumption that the price will just keep going up now can’t afford the loan and can’t sell the house (becuse no one wants it) so they end up foreclosing. Now the builders can’t make a buck because theirs already too many houses and banks don’t want to give loans out because they already loosing all their money to all these people who couldn’t pay. Thus we are looking at a depression. The only possibility to prevent this is for a big institution to go and buy the bad deals, get them off of the market and restore the trust to loan making. The only institution that can do that is the US government. Steven Pearlstein in the Washington post has a good piece on this:

You’re angry. I’m angry. House Republicans are angry. We’re all angry at having to put up huge amounts of cash to rescue a financial system because a lot of very rich people rolled the dice with other people’s money and lost.

Now let me tell you something very simple and very important: You can try to prevent a financial meltdown or you can teach Wall Street a lesson, but you can’t do both at the same time.

So which will it be?

You say you want straight talk — no spin, no bull, no sugar-coating. Okay, here goes.

First, stop fixating on Wall Street executives — there will be time to deal with them later. Even if you clawed back every dime they made over the past decade, it would come to several billions of dollars. That’s a rounding error compared with the size of the financial problem we’re facing here.

Second, we need to act quickly. The financial situation is now downright scary. Don’t look at the stock market — that’s not where the problem is. The problem is in the credit markets, which are quickly freezing. I won’t bore you with technical indicators like Libor and Treasury swap spreads, but if you talk to people who work these markets every day, as I have, they report that the money markets are in worse shape than they were last August, or even during the currency crises of 1998.

Banks and big corporations and even money-market funds are hoarding cash, refusing to lend it out for a day or a week or a month. Even the best companies are having trouble floating bonds at reasonable rates. And the shadow banking system — the market in asset-backed securities that ultimately supplies the capital for most home loans, car loans, college loans — is almost completely shut down.

People are so nervous, and there is so much distrust, that all it would take is one more hit to trigger the modern-day equivalent of a nationwide bank run. Financial institutions would fail, part of your savings would be wiped out, jobs would be lost and a lot of economic activity would grind to a halt. Such a debacle would cost us a lot more than $700 billion.

Third, the latest proposal hammered out between the Treasury and Democratic leaders won’t cost anywhere near $700 billion unless we get a 1930s-like Depression, in which case we’ll have much bigger problems to worry about. Depending on how the program is managed, and how things turn out with the economy and the housing market, the best guess is that the government could wind up either losing or making a couple of hundred billion dollars. The final tab is simply unknowable — it depends on how much the government winds up paying for the securities it buys from banks and other financial institutions, and what price it resells them at after the market and the economy recover.

Fourth, this isn’t primarily a bailout for Wall Street — it’s an attempt to jump-start certain credit markets that have broken to the point that nobody is buying, driving down prices to the point where they are well below any reasonable estimate of their long-term economic value.

The basic idea is to use special auctions to recreate a market for these securities with many competing sellers and one buyer (the Treasury), so that a credible “market” price can be established. If that price turns out to be below what those securities are now valued at on the banks’ balance sheets, then banks will have to take the loss. If the price turns out to be higher, then banks may be able to record gains. The point isn’t to bail out institutions that have made bad bets and suffered credit losses, but to provide a buyer of last resort so the market can begin pricing again.

Are there other ways to structure this market rescue? Sure. You could try to deal with the underlying problem by taking additional measures to prevent foreclosures. Or you could create a mechanism for the government to invest fresh capital in troubled banks, in exchange for stock. In fact, both approaches are possible and envisioned under the administration proposal now under discussion. But neither, by itself, is likely to quickly restore confidence in the financial system and relieve the current crisis.

My own suggestion would be to structure the rescue around a new government-owned corporation that would be capitalized, initially, with $100 billion in taxpayer funds. The company would use auctions or other mechanisms to buy the troubled securities from banks and other regulated institutions, but instead of paying for them in cash, the government would swap them for an equal number of preferred shares in the new company. (Preferred shares are something of a cross between a bond and common stock.) Those preferred shares would pay a government-guaranteed dividend and could be redeemed by the government at any time. But they could also be used by banks to augment the capital they are required to maintain by regulators.

The beauty of this arrangement is that, rather than protecting taxpayers by having the government take an ownership stake in hundreds of privately owned banks, it would be the banks that would own a stake of the government’s rescue vehicle. The government would suffer the first $100 billion in losses from buying and selling the asset-backed securities, but any further losses would be borne by the other shareholders. And should the rescue effort actually wind up making a profit, then the banks would share in that as well.

I mention this idea to make a final point — namely that it is important to give the Treasury secretary and the people he hires a good deal of flexibility in designing and experimenting with the mechanics of this rescue. The reality is that these guys will be operating in uncharted territory, making things up as they go along. That means there are no assurances that any particular approach will work and no assurances that this will be the final solution. It also means that, just as we entrust generals to fight a war, we are going to have to trust the Treasury to find a way out of this crisis.

We are doing this deal to restore the trust involved in giving out loans. But of course as I said in the prevous part congress doesn’t want to do anything because they want to blame the other side with the failure. Democrats are looking to push this off on the republicans despite the fact that they are at fault here. Want proof? Then check this out from the New York times dated September 11, 2003:

The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.

Under the plan, disclosed at a Congressional hearing today, a new agency would be created within the Treasury Department to assume supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored companies that are the two largest players in the mortgage lending industry.

The new agency would have the authority, which now rests with Congress, to set one of the two capital-reserve requirements for the companies. It would exercise authority over any new lines of business. And it would determine whether the two are adequately managing the risks of their ballooning portfolios.

The plan is an acknowledgment by the administration that oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — which together have issued more than $1.5 trillion in outstanding debt — is broken. A report by outside investigators in July concluded that Freddie Mac manipulated its accounting to mislead investors, and critics have said Fannie Mae does not adequately hedge against rising interest rates.

So the president was trying to stop this sour Fannie and Freddie deal way back in 2003! But would congress let him? NO!

Significant details must still be worked out before Congress can approve a bill. Among the groups denouncing the proposal today were the National Association of Home Builders and Congressional Democrats who fear that tighter regulation of the companies could sharply reduce their commitment to financing low-income and affordable housing.

”These two entities — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are not facing any kind of financial crisis,” said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ”The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.”

So in the name of compassion the democrats let Fannie and Freddie continue to make bad loan after bad loan thinking that nothing bad could possibly happen. Well now something bad has happened and now their trying to put the blame on Bush as they always do. Compassion is something you must hold dearly to in your personal life but when you let it make policy then you have disaster. Thus we continue to see panic in the markets and stocks continue to fall every day that congress doesn’t act. So now you get depression. Now this brings me to this last point here in my piece, we are now getting griped with fear.

Lack of Trust in God
“Come on now B’Strad! Now you’re really BSing us here!” I know, I know this may seem to be getting ridiculous here but again bare with me here. Think with me here! Are we really afraid of the right things? Have a look at this Psalm:

Psalm 112:1-8
How joyful are those who fear the Lord
and delight in obeying his commands.
Their children will be successful everywhere;
an entire generation of godly people will be blessed.
They themselves will be wealthy,
and their good deeds will last forever.
Light shines in the darkness for the godly.
They are generous, compassionate, and righteous.
Good comes to those who lend money generously
and conduct their business fairly.
Such people will not be overcome by evil.
Those who are righteous will be long remembered.
They do not fear bad news;
they confidently trust the Lord to care for them.
They are confident and fearless
and can face their foes triumphantly.

Dose it really gain you anything to have a state of fear over all of these little things in life? In the end it really doesn’t matter who wins and looses, if the economy booms or fails, or if wars and terrorism starts to take a grip of everything that we hold dear. That’s not to say that their unimportant and that we shouldn’t be engaged in such things. But if we allow it to grip us with fear so that we throw away everything that’s really important to us then what did we gain? What’s really important is how we spend our short time here on this crazy world. Are you going to spend it griped with fear over all the thing that might happen or are we going to say “Well I’ll deal with that when I get their but now I’m going to spend this time with the people I love and try to bring joy to others.” We’re not fearing the right things here! We keep on talking about all of these hard things but how often to we just sit down and just try to find what God wants from us? Have a look at this in Ecclesiastes:

Ecclesiastes 8:6-8
for there is a time and a way for everything, even when a person is in trouble.

Indeed, how can people avoid what they don’t know is going to happen? None of us can hold back our spirit from departing. None of us has the power to prevent the day of our death. There is no escaping that obligation, that dark battle. And in the face of death, wickedness will certainly not rescue the wicked.

Why throw away what we do have over the little things in this life? Even if all the disasters happen, the sun will still shine another day. You can still see all of the beautiful things that God has made on this earth. If the food prices get too expensive then I’ll start getting good at farming and hunting. If my house gets foreclosed then I’ll go build myself a new home. If gas becomes impossible to get then I’ll get a bike. If I die then I rejoice for I get to meet my maker. All of these things try to pull us away from the things that is most important in this life: what you leave behind in the minds of others. Religious or secular, that’s the only thing that you have left here on this planet when you finally do return to the dust that we have all came from. I know that it’s hard because I have to struggle with this all the time. If I didn’t then I wouldn’t be able to talk to you about it here. Several months back I was ready to come up here to this blog and say the nastiest things to the people that I cared about the most. And over what! Gas prices and the fact that congress wouldn’t do a thing about it! What a waste that would have been! And when I finally had my plans straight to tell everyone off then my self hatred started to creep in again. The one who stopped me was God. I prayed for Him to calm me down and He did. He told me while I was stressing at work “it’s alright, my son. I AM still in control.” I had to get a grip over myself to keep me from busting out crying in the middle of work when He said that. But He filled me with peace again and I finally had regained myself. Who I was always meant to be! You can let the things of this world tear you apart or you can fight hard for the ones that you love. There’s plenty of things to tear you apart in this world. The licker that I am enjoying now can kill you, but you can take it as a blessing from God and keep it from controlling you. The Snuff that I am enjoying now is addictive, but you can hold back from it if you trust in God. Everything in this world seeks your destruction if you let it! “For we are not fighting against flesh-and-blood enemies, but against evil rulers and authorities of the unseen world, against mighty powers in this dark world, and against evil spirits in the heavenly places.” (Ephesians 6:12) It’s within our own mind that the battle must be waged! The temptation to see our selfs as a victim to this world is strong and it’s deeply rooted in our culture but you must fight it if you wish to live a happy life. It’s hard! But we were not promised an easy life on this earth and everyone has a battle to fight. This I know this to be true: one can not bare the cross of another’s. So many times that I talk to others and I realize that if I had been given their circumstances I would be dead. However the vice versa is also true. God tailors our struggles for us and gives us a way out. “Enjoy prosperity while you can, but when hard times strike, realize that both come from God. Remember that nothing is certain in this life.” (Ecclesiastes 7:14)

I know that for you atheists out there I have not given you any good reason to trust in God. In fact it is Irrational of me to say that there is a God. I don’t have a single shred of proof for you that there is a God. However I do have a question for you. Has your fight against the existence of God made you a much happier and kinder person? If it has, then by all means keep on fighting! Make your case to the absolute best of your ability and never hold back! However if it has not, then I think you should ask yourself why that is. I’m am by no means the person that you will be accountable to but rather, yourself. If I am wrong and my faith profits me nothing I can at least say at the end of all things that my faith in God had given me a much more joyous life than I could have possibly have imagined. Will that be true of you my fellow and beloved atheists? We are all born and we all die but what does a life gain if it has no love? What does all the wealth of the earth matter if everyone hates you name for all of eternity? If it is too hard for you to love a God that allows for such a crazy and evil world to exist, then at least love thous around you. You can ether take joy or hate to the grave. I chose Joy!

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A Liberal’s Lament-of Obama!

Posted on September 2nd, 2008 by Darth B'strad.
Categories: Political, Party System, War, Terrorism, Philosophy, Democrats, Iran, Economics.

What! A liberal lamenting Obama! Just say it ain’t so! I am vary sorry for you libs out there but it’s true. Sean Wilentz put up this post at Newsweek on the 23rd last month saying “To win, Obama must convince the country that he is a man of substance, not just style. History suggests this won’t be easy.” And this guy is a professor from Princeton University and he’s slamming on Obama! That’s not good when the people who are suppose to be in you back pocket automatically start getting down on you. Here’s what he put up in Newsweek:

Obama’s most ardent admirers, who include much of the political press and practically all of the liberal intelligentsia, will almost certainly report and analyze the event as a mammoth historical occasion, and quite possibly praise the speech as one of the greatest political orations ever. But will Obama, amid the pulsating theatrics, also attempt the less glamorous and more difficult task of explaining specifically where he wants to move the country, and how he proposes to move it, above and beyond reciting his policy positions? History, as well as recent public-opinion polls, suggests that he badly needs to do so. As a lifelong Democrat who supported Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton during the primaries, I would like to see him succeed in fulfilling his promise.

I don’t think he did a good job of that.

Since the end of World War II, every Democrat who has sought the presidency has attempted to update the legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. From Harry Truman to Bill Clinton, those elected president have refreshed the liberal tradition by promising to put their own stamp upon it, and then doing so. After 40 years of mostly Republican control of the White House, it should be clear that mistakes and overreaching have hampered liberalism’s evolution. But by renewing the idea that government has an important role to play in expanding the opportunities and well-being of ordinary Americans, the basic Democratic tradition has survived through thick and thin.

Senator Obama’s efforts to reinterpret the Democratic legacy have thus far amounted chiefly to promising a dramatic break with the status quo. His rhetoric of “hope” and “change” has thrilled millions of Democrats and helped secure the party’s nomination. Yet millions of other Democrats still find his appeals wispy and unconvincing, and the persistent coolness within the ranks worries some party veterans. Democratic governors have already urged him to be more explicit about how he intends to adjust the party’s principles to meet today’s challenges.

But he knows that if he does that people won’t vote for him. Sean Wilentz then goes through prevous Democrat victories and the “blunders” of the Bush administration and then he says this:

Against this backdrop, how has the presumptive Democratic nominee, Barack Obama, proposed to revivify Democratic liberalism? There is a quotation that ought to give Democrats, and not just Democrats, pause: “This year will not be a year of politics as usual. It can be a year of inspiration and hope, and it will be a year of concern, of quiet and sober reassessment of our nation’s character and purpose. It has already been a year when voters have confounded the experts. And I guarantee you that it will be the year when we give the government of this country back to the people of this country. There is a new mood in America. We have been shaken by a tragic war abroad and by scandals and broken promises at home. Our people are searching for new voices and new ideas and new leaders.”

Delivered in Obama’s exhortatory cadences, the words are uplifting. The trouble is, though they seem to fit, the passage is from Carter’s acceptance speech at the Democratic convention in 1976.

You don’t want to be compared to Carter! and this is a liberal doing it!

The convergence is revealing. As Republican strategists have begun to notice with delight, Obama’s liberal alternative to the post-Bush GOP to date has much in common with Carter’s post-Watergate liberalism. Rejecting “politics as usual,” attacking “Washington” as the problem, promising to heal the breaches and hurts caused by partisan political polarization, pledging to break the grip that lobbyists and special interests hold over the national government, wearing his Christian faith on his sleeve as a key to his mind, heart and soul—in all of these ways, Obama resembles Jimmy Carter more than he does any other Democratic president in living memory.

In other ways, Obama’s liberal vision appears clouded, uncertain and even contradictory. During his four years in Washington, he has compiled one of the most predictably liberal voting records in the Senate—yet he presents himself as an advocate of bipartisanship and ideological flexibility. He has offered himself as the tribune of sweeping change—yet he also proclaims national unity, as if transformation can come without struggle. He has emerged as the champion of a new, post-racial politics, even though he has only grudgingly separated himself from his pastor of 20 years, who every week preached a gospel of “black liberation theology” that has everything to do with racial politics.

Again, a liberal saying this!

The most obvious change to liberal politics Obama has to offer is the color of his skin. Some of his supporters have, whether wittingly or not, been candid enough to say, as Sen. John Kerry did last March, that Obama’s blackness is the rationale for making him president. But it is difficult to square such claims with Obama’s appeal to a liberalism that transcends race. And when Obama himself subtly and not so subtly draws attention to his color, and charges that the John McCain Republicans will try to scare voters by saying he “doesn’t look like all those presidents on the dollar bills,” he turns voting for him into an intrinsically virtuous act, proof that one has resisted base appeals to racism (which, in fact, the McCain campaign has not made).

You have to give props to the other side when they say something right.

Much of Obama’s appeal to the left stems from what might be called the romance of the community organizer. Although his organizing career on Chicago’s South Side was brief and, by his own admission, unremarkable, it distinguishes him as another first of his kind in presidential politics, a candidate who looks at politics from the bottom up. For the left, community organizing trumps party politics and experience in government. Some even imagine that Obama is a secret radical, and they see his emergence as an unparalleled opportunity for advancing their frustrated agendas about issues ranging from the redistribution of wealth to curtailing U.S. power abroad.

I think P. Muse is going to have a much better “community organizer” carer than Obama, and I still won’t vote for him for president, even though I love him (in a friendship sort of sense, that is). By the why, what exactly does “community organizer” mean anyway?

Obama still has a long way to go to describe the kind of liberalism he stands for, how it meets the enormous challenges of the present—and how it will meet as-yet-unanticipated challenges after the election. Nowhere is this more crucial than in the harsh and volatile realm of foreign policy. Last winter, when his candidacy gained traction, Obama’s foreign-policy credentials consisted almost entirely of a speech he gave before a left-wing rally in Chicago in 2002, denouncing the impending invasion of Iraq as “a dumb war.” That speech, made by a state senator representing a liberal district that included the University of Chicago, and that went unreported in the Chicago Tribune’s lengthy article on the rally, was enough to convince many of his supporters that he is blessed with superior acumen and good instincts about foreign affairs. Later comments, such as his promise, later softened, to meet directly and “without preconditions” with the leaders of Iran and other supporters of terrorism, pleased left-wing Democrats and young antiwar voters as a sign of boldness—even as they left experienced diplomats in wonder at such half-baked formulations.

Then, suddenly this summer, Russia attacked Georgia—and Obama’s immediate reaction was to call for reasonableness and good intentions and urge both sides to show restraint and enter into direct talks. Unfortunately his appeal sounded almost like a caricature of liberal wishful thinking. It was left to his opponent, John McCain—whose own past judgments on foreign policy demand scrutiny—to declare right away the sort of thing that might have come naturally to previous generations of liberal Democrats (let alone to a conservative Republican): that “Russia should immediately and unconditionally cease its military operations and withdraw all forces from sovereign Georgian territory.” Beyond the matter of experience, beyond how thoroughly the two candidates had thought through the situation, the difference highlighted how Obama still lacks a comprehensive vision of international politics.

That’s because he’s a lightweight.

That Obama’s record and statements have created any other impression cannot be ascribed only to his campaign’s political skills and the news media’s favor. Liberal intellectuals have largely abdicated their responsibility to provide unblinking and rigorous analysis instead of paeans to Obama’s image. Hardly any prominent liberal thinkers stepped forward to question Obama’s rationalizations about his relationship with his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. Instead, they hailed his ever-changing self-justifications and sometimes tawdry logic—equating his own white grandmother’s discomfort in the presence of a menacing stranger with Wright’s hateful sermons—as worthy of the monumental addresses of Lincoln. Liberal intellectuals actually could have aided their candidate, while also doing their professional duty, by pressing him on his patently evasive accounts about various matters, such as his connections with the convicted wheeler-dealer Tony Rezko, or his more-than-informal ties to the unrepentant terrorist William Ayers, including their years of association overseeing an expensive, high-profile, but fruitless public-school reform effort in Chicago. Instead, the intellectuals have failed Obama as well as their readers by branding such questioning as irrelevant, malicious or heretical.

Ouch!

Can Obama, who lost the large industrial states in the primaries, deal with a troubled economy and become the standard bearer for the working and middle classes—the historic core of the Democratic Party that the last two Democratic candidates lost? Can the inexperienced candidate persuasively outline a new foreign policy that addresses the quagmires left by the Bush administration and faces the challenges of terrorism and a resurgent Russia? Can the less-than-one-term senator become the master of the Congress and enact goals such as universal health care that have eluded Democratic presidents since Truman? On these fundamental questions may hang the fate of Obama’s candidacy. In the absence of a compelling record, set speeches, even with the most stirring words, will not resolve these matters. And until he resolves them, Obama will remain the most unformed candidate in the modern history of presidential politics.

Man that’s really harsh! This is a liberal professor saying this! Not to mention that we are seeing a real resurgence of the conservitive movement by the nomination of Sarah Palin. I mean top conservatives of our day are saying that she is the rebirth of Reagan here. I been hearing women just calling her Sarah! I think Obama’s in for a big surprise come November and I even think that McCain may even step aside after one term and just let Sarah take over. Wait… now I just did it!

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The Empire Strikes Back!

Posted on August 13th, 2008 by Darth B'strad.
Categories: Political, Energy, Ethics, Europe, War, Terrorism, Philosophy.

Just as you thought that things this year really couldn’t get all that more crazy this year you get slapped down with yet another crazy event that just makes life in this world just that much more absurd and much more dangerous. We are having the most absurd election in a long time (the DNC of this is also going to be in my hometown), we have an energy crisis (that Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats are forcing down our thoughts because of their environmental lobby), we have had possible wars breaking out in Colombia and Venezuela (Also something that Nancy Pelosi has had a hand in), we have a very real possibility that Israel will bomb Iran (that could lead to some really bad repercussions), not to mention all of the weird things that have been going on in my personal life and now in the mists of the Olympic games in China, we have Russia blowing up Georgia! No, not our state here in the US but the Country Georgia just south of Russia (you know! one of those countries that gained independence after the Soviet Union fell.) Well the Russians are back at it again! They’re trying to rebuild the Empire and that’s going to make things even more strange before this year concludes. This from the Washington Post:

Russia escalated its war in Georgia again Monday, sending troops and tanks out of friendly separatist enclaves to stage the first major invasion of undisputed Georgian territory. One armored column seized a town and major military base in the west of Georgia, while another menaced the central city of Gori.

The Georgian government abandoned Gori and ordered its troops to fall back to defend against a possible drive on Tbilisi, the capital, 40 miles away. In scenes of chaos, retreating Georgian army trucks shared the highway to the capital with cars and pickups loaded with frightened civilians. Other vehicles, victims of Russian attacks, burned by the roadside.

Georgian and Russian officials confirmed that Russian soldiers took over the western city of Senaki and its base, about 25 miles from Abkhazia, a disputed separatist zone where Russia has been massing troops in recent days. The seizure effectively opened a second front.

There was confusion Monday night over the status of Gori, with some reports saying it was already in Russian hands. The country’s main east-west highway, which passes through the city, was cut, Georgian officials said, and rumors swirled among residents of the capital that Russian soldiers would soon be on their streets.

In a television address, President Mikheil Saakashvili accused Russia of the “preplanned, coldblooded . . . murder of a small country.” His government, among the most pro-American in the region, appealed again to the outside world for help.

Well I’ll say so! This is crazy!

In Washington, President Bush toughened his rhetoric. “Russia has invaded a sovereign neighboring state and threatens a democratic government elected by its people. Such an action is unacceptable in the 21st century,” Bush said.

Well that will really scare the Russians!

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin used sharp language as well, accusing the West of supporting Georgian leaders who he contends committed genocide when their troops swept into the separatist zone of South Ossetia last week. The soldiers wiped out 10 villages, Putin said. “The very scale of this cynicism is astonishing,” he declared.

Putin also condemned the United States for airlifting Georgian troops home from Iraq on an emergency basis. Still dressed in desert fatigues, the Georgian soldiers stepped off a U.S. Air Force transport at a Georgian airport Monday.

I guess we at least did something! Doesn’t seem like much to me!

Moscow’s intentions remained a mystery. Russian soldiers, riding tanks and armored personnel carriers, were on the move even as Russian President Dmitry Medvedev seemed to suggest that the military operation was nearing its end, and a Russian general said there was no plan to take territory outside Georgia’s two pro-Russian separatist zones. Senior European officials flew into the Georgian capital to try to mediate a cease-fire plan that so far the Russians have ignored.

Repeat after me: “He’s K-G-B!” It’s all about power and dominance with them!

Over the weekend, Georgian leaders declared a unilateral cease-fire. But with Russian troops operating outside the country’s two separatist zones on soil the central government has always controlled, at least some Georgian forces were again in combat mode. Reporters witnessed Georgian troops and six helicopter gunships opening fire near the border of South Ossetia, one of the zones.

Abkhazia and South Ossetia broke away from Georgia in the early 1990s and have formed close relations with Russia. Last week, Georgian forces launched a major offensive that captured the South Ossetian capital in an effort to reestablish central government control; Russian forces drove them out two days later.

Let me see here? A little county call Georgia decides they need to get some control over their rebels and then that gives Russia permission to completely blow that country up!

The Russian news agency RIA-Novosti, quoting Russian Defense Ministry officials, confirmed the seizure of the Senaki base and said that Russia sent “peacekeepers” there on a “preventative mission.” Another Russian official, speaking in Moscow, said the seizure was designed to prevent Georgian forces from using the base to re-group and launch new attacks on South Ossetia. Russia accuses Georgia of continuing to shell South Ossetia.

Preventative mission! Why would Georgia have any reason to strike at Russia. Their not insane like the Jihadist!

The Russian news agency Interfax later reported that Russian troops had pulled out of Senaki after “eliminating” the potential to shell South Ossetia.

Senaki is several hours’ drive from South Ossetia and had been a concern for separatists in Abkhazia, not South Ossetia. Completed in 2006, the base was built to meet standards of the NATO alliance, which Georgia aspires to join.

And there’s the real reason! Russia doesn’t want the west to gain more reliable allies in their back yard. So their going to blow up a little country so that they can maintain dominance. It’s just Russians reverting back to being… Well, Russians!

The French and Finnish foreign ministers visited Tbilisi on Monday as part of a diplomatic push to end the fighting. They visited Gori as well, where they inspected a bombed apartment building. Bernard Kouchner, the French minister, said he wanted to get a “strong picture” of events on the ground. Finland’s Alexander Stubb was present in his country’s capacity as rotating head of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

The Fins remember getting invaded by Russia back in 1940 and I am sure that they are looking at this quite seriously along with the rest of the countries in the former eastern bloc.

Saakashvili joined them in Gori. Toward the end of the visit, the sound of an airplane overhead caused panic among his security detail. Shouting “air, air” in Georgian, his bodyguards pulled him to the ground and covered him with flak jackets for protection. They later bundled him into a sport-utility vehicle that sped off.

Earlier Monday, Saakashvili signed a peace proposal offered by Kouchner, which calls for a cease-fire, the withdrawal of forces to positions held before the start of the recent hostilities, an international peacekeeping presence in South Ossetia, and the respect of Georgia’s territorial integrity.

It is unclear whether the plan will be acceptable in Moscow. Russians have said that Georgia must sign an agreement not to use force against the two separatist enclaves, which under international law are part of Georgia. Other Russian officials have suggested that Georgian troops near the enclaves would have to surrender their weapons to the Russians.

Well that’s a great deal for Georgia! Well, they don’t have many options. They have to hope that Russia will keep it’s word that they have already broken before.

Russian officials continued Monday to defend their country’s actions. Grigory Karasin, Russia’s deputy foreign minister, said Monday that “we want television screens in the West to be showing not only Russian tanks and saying Russia is at war in South Ossetia and with Georgia, but also to be showing the suffering of the Ossetian people, the murdered elderly people and children, the destroyed towns of South Ossetia, and Tskhinvali. This would be an objective way of presenting the material.”

Yea, Ok! Whatever you want.

The Russian claims of atrocities have not been independently verified. Some of them appear to echo hearsay accounts provided on Russian television by South Ossetians who fled a Georgian military assault on the capital, Tskhinvali.

Some of the few reporters who have visited Tskhinvali described a devastated city with large numbers of dead. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov said in a CNN interview Monday that 2,000 people had died in South Ossetia during the recent Georgian offensive.

Honestly, I really don’t know enough on this but Russia broke it’s word and they are asserting dominance over this region again and now to mention that they are the main suppliers to Iran, This situation makes me sick.

Western countries, particularly members of the European Union, are far from united about the conflict. East European and Baltic countries have been harshly critical of Russia’s action.

Major powers such as Germany, France and Britain have called for an end to the fighting, but they have avoided directly condemning Russia. Italy, whose prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, is a friend of Putin’s, is sympathetic to Russia’s position.

“We cannot create an anti-Russia coalition in Europe, and on this point we are close to Putin’s position,” said Foreign Minister Franco Frattini, speaking to the newspaper La Stampa. “This war has pushed Georgia further away . . . from Europe.”

Yea for the Italians! Man this is really starting to get bad! Now we have a Russia that is starting to turn fascist and is reasserting control over the former easter bloc countries and not to mention the oil situation we have going on makes this a big power grab for Russia. That is a massive stretch that Russia is just doing this to help the poor South Ossetians how are being brutalized by Georgia due to the fact that there is a massive oil pipe running through Georgia and oil just so happens to be at 140 bucks a barrel. This is sure to test the McCain and Obama on if they are ready to actually able to run this county. As expected McCain takes a more hawkish stance:

The candidates’ responses to the crisis were initially very different in tone. Sen. McCain forcefully blamed Russia, a country he has taken a hard stand on in the past. He has called for ejecting Russia from the Group of Eight leading nations and has mocked President George W. Bush’s statement that he saw goodness in former Russian President Vladimir Putin. Sen. McCain said that when he looked into Mr. Putin’s eyes, he “saw three letters: K-G-B.”

“Russia should immediately and unconditionally cease its military operations and withdraw all forces from sovereign Georgian territory,” Sen. McCain said Friday morning. He credited Georgia for having called for a cease-fire.

While Obama takes his usual talk it through stance:

Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama opposes excluding Russia from the Group of Eight industrial nations, as suggested by Republican rival John McCain, saying Moscow’s cooperation was needed in the fight against nuclear proliferation.

“It would be a mistake,” Obama told CNN in an interview when asked about McCain’s proposal. CNN on Saturday released excerpts from the interview that will air on Sunday.

“Look, if we’re going to do something about nuclear proliferation, just to take one issue that I think is as important as any on the list, we’ve got to have Russia involved,” the Illinois senator said.

“The amount of loose nuclear material that is floating around in the former Soviet Union, the amount of technical know-how that is in countries that used to be behind the Iron Curtain, without Russia’s cooperation, our efforts in that on that front will be greatly weakened.”

Man this is just getting insane! What’s next? China starts invading Taiwan? India starts invading Pakistan? Heck! for all we know maybe Iran already has a nuke ready and has it set up to lunch at Israel! And with that great Iranian Ballistic engineering; maybe it’ll just go haywire and just hit Egypt instead! This just seems to be the year for really crazy stuff to come out! (I wanted to curse right there but I thought I should try to stay professional.) We are most cleanly living the Chinese curse (and it’s ironic that the Olympics are in China.) “May you live in interesting times.” I hope that things will get really boring really fast but that’s not the current trend today!

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Another Obama Post!

Posted on July 8th, 2008 by Darth B'strad.
Categories: Political, Immigration, Energy, Environment, Abortion, Party System, War, Law, Constitutional Law, Terrorism, Republicans, Democrats, Iraq, Israel, Economics.

Yes yes, that’s right! I’m posting on Obama again because this is just too important to pass up. Townhall.com has had two of my favorite talk show hosts: Hugh Hewitt and Dennis Prager. I’ll start with Prager’s article first:

My bottom line is this: The gulf between John McCain and conservatives is miniscule compared to the gulf between John McCain and Barack Obama. This is true regarding virtually every issue of significance to America. The America that a President Barack Obama would shape, with the help of a Democratic Congress and a liberal Supreme Court, would be very dissimilar from the America shaped by a President John McCain.

Conservatives who will not vote for McCain are well-intentioned utopians. They are comparing McCain to a consistently conservative candidate. The reality, however, is that McCain is not running against a consistently conservative candidate. He is running against a consistently left-wing candidate. And America cannot afford to have its first leftist president ever. It can afford liberal presidents — such as Bill Clinton, or Jimmy Carter (who governed as a liberal but became a leftist after leaving the White House), or John F. Kennedy, or Lyndon Johnson, or Harry Truman — i.e., all the Democrats who have been president since World War II. But the Democratic Party has moved well to the left of liberalism. And Barack Obama is at the left of that left-wing party.

Furthermore, given the strong possibility of a Democratic House, a Democratic Senate, and a liberal Supreme Court for decades to come, given the number of Supreme Court appointments a Democratic president will be able to make, an Obama victory will move America more radically leftward than ever in its history.

The Supreme court is good reason in it’s self! It’s taken a long to just to get it to a swing court. An Obama presidency will ensure that it stays a swing court and possibly reverse what we have wanted all along. The next president has the possibility of picking the next six supreme court justices.

That is why the argument that an Obama administration will be so destructive that Americans will reject the left and then elect a real conservative to undo the damage done in an Obama presidency is deeply flawed.

First of all, other than impeachment, there is no way to undo Supreme Court appointments, two or three of which a President Obama would likely make. And given how active most liberal judges are, it won’t matter much if the country has some conservative epiphany and then elects a Republican president and Congress. Because even if the Congress and the president will not pass liberal legislation, a liberal Supreme Court will. On almost any social issue that matters — the right to bear arms, late-term abortion, the definition of marriage, capital punishment, and many others — a liberal Supreme Court will rule on these issues, and there will be nothing that a post-Obama Republican president, even with a Republican congress, will be able to do about them.

Moreover, the argument that Americans will have a conservative epiphany after four years of an Obama presidency is predicated on America being greatly damaged by his policies. What kind of mindset welcomes such damage to the country it loves for the sake of potentially gaining politically after the damage is done? Is it, for example, really worth a considerably weakened economy (which Barack Obama’s tax and other economic policies would likely lead to), with its widespread suffering and unforeseeable social and political consequences, just to — hopefully — get a conservative into the White House four or eight years later?

And the damage won’t necessarily be undone. Even Ronald Reagan, the most popular conservative to ever serve as president, could not roll back most liberal creations. He never could get rid of the useless Department of Education, for example. Nor could a then-popular President George W. Bush do a thing about Social Security even when he had a Republican House and Senate. And how will Barack Obama’s successor undo the damage done to Iraq, the Middle East, the War on Islamic Terror, and the credibility of America’s assurances to allies once Iraq slides into chaos as a result of America’s precipitous withdrawal from Iraq?

Therefore, as well meaning and sincere as many conservatives are, this mode of thinking — let the country suffer under a left-wing president, Congress, and Supreme Court and then it will come to its conservative senses — will likely lead to a downward spiral from which it is hard to see the country escaping for a generation, if it is lucky.

There is one person who can prevent this unhappy future — John McCain.

He will not raise taxes, the last thing we should be doing in a weakened economy.

He will reduce government spending, and thereby prevent the state from controlling even more of American life.

He will ensure that America wins in Iraq. That will make one of the biggest and richest Arab states the freest of the Arab states. And it will hand Islamic terrorists the biggest defeat they have ever suffered. It will teach potential enemies not to attack America (whether Iraq did so directly is irrelevant to the point). And it will reassure America’s allies around the world, many of whom, as in Iraq, risk their lives for America and liberty, that America will never abandon them.

He will appoint conservatives to the Supreme Court and to federal benches, thereby depriving the left of its most powerful weapon in reshaping America in its image.

He may attract enough Hispanic votes (while securing the borders) to prevent that critical constituency from identifying with the Democratic Party, something that would ensure left-wing victories for decades to come.

He will develop nuclear power, environmentalist (read leftist) opposition to which has been morally indefensible. We would all love to have a solar powered or wind powered country. However, on planet earth at this time, nuclear power may be the cleanest source of energy we have. That is why France, not heretofore known as politically conservative, relies on nuclear power for nearly 80 percent of its electricity.

Now to Hugh Hewitt’s bit:

The key: McCain will pursue victory in the war, deter our enemies because of his reputation for strength and defend the country via aggressive pursuit of terrorists in Iraq, Afghanistan and wherever they are, and get most of the judicial nominees right. He’ll keep taxes where they are if he can.

Obama, on the other hand, is just now coming into focus for other than the already committed Obamians. He had a stumbling, bumbling close to his primary campaign, and the opening weeks of his general campaign have been marked by flip flops and lurches left.

Here’s the core of Obama:

He’s hard left.

He wants the marginal rate on total federal taxes, including his social security tax hike, to immediately rise at least 57% on the highest earners. Obama wants to raise taxes even in a weak economy, though this is a recipe not just for recession but worse. Obama also wants to raise taxes on dividend income and to return the death tax to its highs of eight years ago.

Obama has proposed more than a trillion dollars in new spending.

Obama is going to absolutely destroy this economy even worse than it is.

Obama wants to cut and run from Iraq, with withdrawals of crucial forces beginning immediately upon his entry into office. Obama has never met one on one with General Petraeus and has not been to Iraq in more than 900 days. He is indifferent to the incredible progress made by our troops and the Iraqi Defense Forces and the Iraqi government in the last 18 months.

He supports the decision extending habeas rights to Gitmo detainees and he thinks the most liberal member of the Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, is a great model for future Supreme Court appointments.

Obama supports gay marriage, and opposes the California constitutional amendment to restore marriage to the definition overturned by a 4-3 vote of the California Supreme Court in May. He supports abortion on demand, including partial birth abortion.

If any of you care about abortion and gay marriage, Obama’s going to shove it down your through.

Obama has the slightest grasp on history, and routinely makes the sort of errors about basic facts that shock knowledgeable observers, like arguing the Kennedy-Khrushchev summit in Vienna was an example of the benefits of one-on-one diplomacy.

Obama is not a strong friend of Israel. He spent 20 years in a church that was openly hostile to Israel, and he reversed himself on Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel after one day of criticism by Palestinians.

Obama is running a dirty campaign, and the serial assaults on John McCain’s service, most visibly by Wesley Clark but by many others closely associated with Obama, is repulsive. These are not hits by independent 527s but by close associates and advisors of Obama.

Michelle Obama’s campaign rhetoric has been very divisive, is full of anger and resentment about “moving the bar,” and not being proud of the country, and has led to her high negatives with the public.

Obama’s close friends, mentors and associates are deeply troubling: the radical pastor Jeremiah Wright, the unrepentant terrorists William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, the convicted swindler Tony Rezko, and now a long line of “public housing developers” who took the money and failed to deliver on promises of safe and secure housing for Obama’s poorest constituents.

Obama’s judgment on key appointees is suspect, and he has had to fire the head of his vice presidential search team because of ties to the subprime mess and dump numerous “foreign policy advisors” for their hostility to Israel.

Obama’s deal with the Teamsters to end federal oversight of the union smells very bad indeed and telegraphs the sort of cronyism we could expect from an Obama Adminsitration. Obama’s mentor and real estate partner is Rezko, who helped the Obama’s buy their home, a home on which the Obamas received a mortgage that looks to many like a sweetheart deal.

Obama, like the other leaders of the Triple D Democrats –the Don’t Drill Democrats– doesn’t care about the price of gas, and refuses every initiative to increase supply and thus bring that price down.

Obama has broken his word on his commitment to public financing of the campaign and to meet John McCain in frequent debates. Obama can’t be trusted to keep even high-profile promises he made even only weeks ago.

Away from a teleprompter Obama stumbles and stutters and lapses into a closed circle of cliches that betrays almost no reading or curiosity about the world around him,and a massive ignorance of the war in which we find ourselves. Even when he works from a prompter he says nothing at great length with wonder phrasing but zero substance.

His crowds are enormous and his coffers overflowing, the products of a highly energized and vitriolic left that expects –believes it will be owed, in fact– the spoils of the election. If Obama wins, the sharpest lurch left in American history is ahead of us.

Barack Obama is not only the most radical nominee of a major American political party in history, he is also the least prepared and the least informed. He has spent less than four years inside of the United States Senate, and much of those years have been spent away from his job and away from the capital he wants to lead. But he is protected and his campaign nurtured by a MSM that swooned for him long ago. The prolonged and serious scrutiny of his background and his proposals will not be forthcoming in any consistent way between now and November.

And that’s the argument against Obama. So what’s the argument for him? Oh, yea that’s right: he’s for change! Well if you are looking for big changes to where the government is in control of every aspect of your life then Obama is your man. I’ll pass on that! I’m voteing for McCain.

0 comments.

A Question to the Democrats

Posted on May 21st, 2008 by Darth B'strad.
Categories: Political, Party System, War, Terrorism, Philosophy, Democrats, Iraq.

This Question actually comes from Joseph Lieberman in the Wall Street Journal (by the way he was a life long democrat until the Democrats kicked him out of his party for saying things not too popular with them):

How did the Democratic Party get here? How did the party of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy drift so far from the foreign policy and national security principles and policies that were at the core of its identity and its purpose?

Beginning in the 1940s, the Democratic Party was forced to confront two of the most dangerous enemies our nation has ever faced: Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. In response, Democrats under Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy forged and conducted a foreign policy that was principled, internationalist, strong and successful.

Apparently that party doesn’t exist anymore!

This was the Democratic Party that I grew up in – a party that was unhesitatingly and proudly pro-American, a party that was unafraid to make moral judgments about the world beyond our borders. It was a party that understood that either the American people stood united with free nations and freedom fighters against the forces of totalitarianism, or that we would fall divided.

This was the Democratic Party of Harry Truman, who pledged that “it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”

And this was the Democratic Party of John F. Kennedy, who promised in his inaugural address that the United States would “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of freedom.”

It’s funny that people compare Obama to JFK when he doesn’t share any of JFK’s values.

This worldview began to come apart in the late 1960s, around the war in Vietnam. In its place, a very different view of the world took root in the Democratic Party. Rather than seeing the Cold War as an ideological contest between the free nations of the West and the repressive regimes of the communist world, this rival political philosophy saw America as the aggressor – a morally bankrupt, imperialist power whose militarism and “inordinate fear of communism” represented the real threat to world peace.

It argued that the Soviets and their allies were our enemies not because they were inspired by a totalitarian ideology fundamentally hostile to our way of life, or because they nursed ambitions of global conquest. Rather, the Soviets were our enemy because we had provoked them, because we threatened them, and because we failed to sit down and accord them the respect they deserved. In other words, the Cold War was mostly America’s fault.

It’s always America’s fault! Right?

Of course that leftward lurch by the Democrats did not go unchallenged. Democratic Cold Warriors like Scoop Jackson fought against the tide. But despite their principled efforts, the Democratic Party through the 1970s and 1980s became prisoner to a foreign policy philosophy that was, in most respects, the antithesis of what Democrats had stood for under Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy.

Then, beginning in the 1980s, a new effort began on the part of some of us in the Democratic Party to reverse these developments, and reclaim our party’s lost tradition of principle and strength in the world. Our band of so-called New Democrats was successful sooner than we imagined possible when, in 1992, Bill Clinton and Al Gore were elected. In the Balkans, for example, as President Clinton and his advisers slowly but surely came to recognize that American intervention, and only American intervention, could stop Slobodan Milosevic and his campaign of ethnic slaughter, Democratic attitudes about the use of military force in pursuit of our values and our security began to change.

But they still didn’t do a good job of it!

This happy development continued into the 2000 campaign, when the Democratic candidate – Vice President Gore – championed a freedom-focused foreign policy, confident of America’s moral responsibilities in the world, and unafraid to use our military power. He pledged to increase the defense budget by $50 billion more than his Republican opponent – and, to the dismay of the Democratic left, made sure that the party’s platform endorsed a national missile defense.

By contrast, in 2000, Gov. George W. Bush promised a “humble foreign policy” and criticized our peacekeeping operations in the Balkans.

That’s also funny that Democrats don’t bring that up. Things did completely switch.

Today, less than a decade later, the parties have completely switched positions. The reversal began, like so much else in our time, on September 11, 2001. The attack on America by Islamist terrorists shook President Bush from the foreign policy course he was on. He saw September 11 for what it was: a direct ideological and military attack on us and our way of life. If the Democratic Party had stayed where it was in 2000, America could have confronted the terrorists with unity and strength in the years after 9/11.

Instead a debate soon began within the Democratic Party about how to respond to Mr. Bush. I felt strongly that Democrats should embrace the basic framework the president had advanced for the war on terror as our own, because it was our own. But that was not the choice most Democratic leaders made. When total victory did not come quickly in Iraq, the old voices of partisanship and peace at any price saw an opportunity to reassert themselves. By considering centrism to be collaboration with the enemy – not bin Laden, but Mr. Bush – activists have successfully pulled the Democratic Party further to the left than it has been at any point in the last 20 years.

Far too many Democratic leaders have kowtowed to these opinions rather than challenging them. That unfortunately includes Barack Obama, who, contrary to his rhetorical invocations of bipartisan change, has not been willing to stand up to his party’s left wing on a single significant national security or international economic issue in this campaign.

The left runs that party now and not the liberals.

In this, Sen. Obama stands in stark contrast to John McCain, who has shown the political courage throughout his career to do what he thinks is right – regardless of its popularity in his party or outside it.

John also understands something else that too many Democrats seem to have become confused about lately – the difference between America’s friends and America’s enemies.

This is where I disagree. I don’t want to get rid of partisanship because that is one of the tings that makes this county great. Having politicians get up there and push for the best ideas and letting the American people decide what is better. I like that! Not to mention that if there was no partisanship we would be living in an idealistic society where we can all sing kum by ya and just get along. That place does not exist and will not exist on this planet.

There are of course times when it makes sense to engage in tough diplomacy with hostile governments. Yet what Mr. Obama has proposed is not selective engagement, but a blanket policy of meeting personally as president, without preconditions, in his first year in office, with the leaders of the most vicious, anti-American regimes on the planet.

Mr. Obama has said that in proposing this, he is following in the footsteps of Reagan and JFK. But Kennedy never met with Castro, and Reagan never met with Khomeini. And can anyone imagine Presidents Kennedy or Reagan sitting down unconditionally with Ahmadinejad or Chavez? I certainly cannot.

OHhhh! Going straight at Obama! I say keep it up Lieberman!

If a president ever embraced our worst enemies in this way, he would strengthen them and undermine our most steadfast allies.

A great Democratic secretary of state, Dean Acheson, once warned “no people in history have ever survived, who thought they could protect their freedom by making themselves inoffensive to their enemies.” This is a lesson that today’s Democratic Party leaders need to relearn.

Harsh criticism from the Democrats Vice Presidential nominee in 2000. It’s also very true and that party has gone far left and they keep on nominating someone more left than the previous one. This party is an irresponsible party and they will take us down a direction that will be destructive. However the Republican party isn’t doing much better ether. We are in full out political meltdown here in both parties (although the Democrats are in a worse position than the republicans). You can just boil this down to saying that we have two parties; one is dangerous and one is stupid. So I am for the stupid party.

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Terrorism

The Authors

Categories

Articles

Bieren Links

Darth B'Strad Links

invot's Links

Index for posts concerning Terrorism

Dear Girl sitting in front of me eating dates and knitting pt 2

A journey into the political ideas of Distinguished Bean… (Compare/Contrast with the Congressman from Texas)

A letter to the Pacifist Muse.

Intifada in the Gaza Ghetto

Things are blowing up in Israel, Again!

Palin, Clinton, Ahmadinejad, The Financial Collapse and God

A Liberal’s Lament-of Obama!

The Empire Strikes Back!

Another Obama Post!

A Question to the Democrats