Friday Afternoon Roundup - The US Election's Stakes for the Entire World

It has been a short few weeks, blogwise, due to the proximity of so many holidays which has cut down on posts and articles, but next week Sultan Knish will be getting back to normal. Or as normal as it ever is. Tableclothes are being lifted off, furniture is being set down and regular blogging will resume.

The world though is not standing still. The election showdown is drawing near in America that will serve as the anchor point for elections across the world. A major reason so much money from abroad is being used to influence the American election is because American policy translates into policy for any number of countries, including across Europe and in Israel.

The more Obama and his supporters talk about changing the world, the more this hits home. Europeans who are not paying much attention to the US election and think that it doesn't involve them, might want to imagine an American administration that employs punitive measures, including boycotts, against European governments who send back Asylum seekers, deport radical Imams or crack down forcefully on riots. Those are just baseline examples.

America was used as a tool to destroy Yugoslavia and create a Jihadist state, but comparing the Clinton administration which was responsible for that, to an Obama administration, is like comparing Tony Blair to Hugo Chavez. An Obama victory will not just mean bad times for America or even Israel, but bad times for the world.

Across Europe, Africa and Asia, Obama and his backers will be able to do what he only tried to do in Kenya, and while US troops may leave Iraq, the odds are they will be used as "peacekeepers" to protect Islamist terrorist groups and enforce compromises in numerous countries dealing with Islamic and left wing radical terrorism.

Considering how much damage Chavez has been able to do by exporting revolution in Latin America, Obama's export of revolution using the US as a base will be a great deal worse. In 4 years there may not be a single non-left wing dictatorship left in South America, and we can expect succesful "democratic" revolutions in Egypt and Saudi Arabia that will put the Muslim Brotherhood in charge. Not to mention a Jerusalem divided by barbed wire and bunkers again, and a Columbia with a FARC friendly government.

So if this blog speaks frequently about the US election, what is at stake is more than just the US.

Turning to the blogsphere now, the Powerline blog has uncovered the deliberate "gates down" approach of the Obama campaign credit card fraud. With a disabled address verification system, huge amounts of illegal money are coming in, from credit card fraud to false names.

The reality behind the Obama campaign is that a lot of the structure for it is abroad, the money is coming in from abroad and Eastern Europe which is the home of some major credit card fraud is no doubt playing a role in at least passing along the money.

As Mark Steyn writes

[I]n order to accept donations from "Della Ware" and "Saddam Hussein" et al, the Obama website had, intentionally, to disable all the default security settings on their credit-card processing. I took a look at the inner sanctum of my (alas, far more modest) online retail operation this afternoon and, in order to permit fraud as easy as that which the Obama campaign is facilitating, you have to uncheck every single box on the AVS system, each one of which makes it very explicit just what you're doing - ie, accepting transactions with no "billing address", no "street address" match, no "zip code" match, with a bank "of non-US origin" (I've got nothing against those, but a US campaign fundraiser surely should be wary), etc. When you've disabled the whole lot one step at a time, then you've got a system tailor-made for fake names and bogus addresses.

As I've said before the Obama campaign has little in common with the traditional political campaign on the right and the left. It has far more in common with a criminal enterprise, the consistent patterns of fraud, the MLM aspects, the shiny exterior hiding complex mechanisms that sustain it through illegal activities.

Madgeburger Joe meanwhile points out that Chavez's own failures highlight why Obama's socialism would be such a disaster

Venezuela, an OPEC member and a major producer of oil is now suffering power blackouts, some of them hitting most heavily neighbourhoods that are Hugo Chavez electoral strongholds.

The very regions targeted by Chavez for ambitious education and medical assistance programs are now finding their lives blighted by lack of electricity. The Yahoo News article cites the example of an elderly woman , blind and surviving on a pacemaker who lacks even an electric fan to help her through hot and humid nights.

Socialism may sound nice and even noble but in practice it becomes a drain. As Marx himself knew, only a wealthy country can even begin to afford socialism and after a few generations the escalating tide of bureacracy and regulations and program costs insure that it becomes incapable of sustaining the burden.

But of course the money isn't just being spread around at home. It goes abroad too. Elder of Ziyon reports that the US government has given the Palestinian Authority, run by the Fatah gang, 700 million dollars in just this year alone

A statement from the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem says American aid to the Palestinians in 2008 now totals over $700 million and exceeds the amount the U.S. pledged at a donors conference in December 2007.

Now this is at a time when the US economy is in decline and average Americans are wondering how to pay our bills. Meanwhile the price of real estate in Ramallah is actually rising, even as it's falling across the US.

The 41-page paper said local government data from the commercial and political center of Ramallah indicates the value of prime downtown commercial plots has doubled each year since 2005, hitting the current average of about $372 a square foot.

How nice. Naturally if you're wondering where that 700 million really goes, I've written about that myself in the past.

"Since the Palestinian government was never providing much in the way of services to begin with, actual services like electricity and water all coming from the Israeli side, the real issue is the 165,000 government workers. But why does the PA which has little in the way of an infrastructure need 165,000 government workers?

Even the largest estimates of the Palestinian population clock in at around 3 million. That's one government worker per 18 Palestinians.

42.9 percent or 1.06 million of the overall population is under 14 and so wouldn't hold down government jobs either. An additional 73,000 is over 65. Of the remainder in the 15-64 year category 676,427 are male and 644,347 female. The female half can be eliminated as women generally don't hold down jobs in the PA.

That means the actual ratio of Palestinian adult men is 676,427 to government workers at 165,000. In other words every 1 in 4 or 25 percent of Palestinian men would be government employees. On wages subsidized by America and Europe.

Now since many of these employees don't hold down actual jobs but are Fatah militia members or their relatives, there's plenty of extra money in play to help fund their own private enterprises in Ramallah which helps the local real estate market.

And with Iran facing its own economic problems Joe Biden's post 9/11 call to give Iran 200 million dollars is more timely than ever. After all our enemies can't be expected to fund their own terorism. Not when they're too busy funding the Obama campaign. And with Ahmadinejad reportedly sick, we're wasting valuable appeasement time.

Meanwhile No Apology has an important report on The Third Jihad, a documentary covering the rise of radical Islam in America, and one wonders how much of that winds up being funded by taxpayer dollars too, one way or another. Either way the battle goes on and the nature of the two sides comes in clear, as Lemon Lime Moon writes,

When I was a kid I used to wonder how anyone could not see that the Soviet Union was evil. I mean they had to shoot people who tried to leave! What kind of ugly place has to force their people to stay? More so, what kind of a world would ever see that as a viable or right kind of government?? Yet, many did, do and continue to preach a Socialist plan for the world.

A look at the nighttime map of North Korea with its one tiny light as compared with South Korea's illumination shows the backward nature of a repressive Communist nation. We know the tortures and degradation there. We know from "tourists" that there is no freedom of any kind yet people praise North Korea and other Communist thugocracies as something to emulate.

Now with Obama we're promised Castro's much vaunted health care, Putin's domestic economic policies and Iran's foreign policy transmuted to Washington D.C. word for word.

And it cannot be allowed to happen.