Friday Afternoon Roundup - Going for Broke

 GOING FOR BROKE

According to Hillary Clinton’s long-delayed Benghazigate testimony, the State Department just did not have enough money to provide security for a mission in one of the most dangerous places in the world.

It did however have 16 million dollars to spend on 2,500 kindle book readers at the drastically inflated price of $6,600 per device.

It had $79,000 to spend on Obama’s books and $20,000 on a portrait of Obama. The US Embassy had $150,000 to spend on a book about the ambassador’s residence.

There was $4.5 for art in embassies, but no money for Benghazi security.




THE WAR IS OVER, WE LOST

Mullah Baradar’s capture by the CIA in coordination with the ISI was really the only serious victory won against the Taliban in recent years.

While Baradar is often referred to as second-in-command of the Taliban, with Mullah Omar’s whereabouts and aliveness still uncertain, he was in practice the leader of the Taliban.

Now Pakistan plans to release all Taliban prisoners, including Baradar.




GUNNING FOR AMERICA

Under Socialism, you don’t have to pass a law, you just have to use your economic control to make the companies enforce the law.

Growing government control over banks and investment companies, directly and indirectly, allows those institutions to be used to target firearms manufacturers.

Cerberus was bullied into dropping the Freedom Group which includes Remington and Bushmaster. Now Rahm Emanuel is demanding that TD Bank and Bank of America end their lines of credit to firearms manufacturers unless they come out in support of Obama’s war on the Bill of Rights.

The Party that claims to be upset at corporate influence over politics is trying to forcibly create a corporate lobby in favor of abrogating the Bill of Rights by exploiting their leverage over banks and the leverage of banks over private companies.

Obama Inc Trying to Use Banks to Destroy Gun Manufacturers




NOTHING TO SAY

I considered writing an article after the disastrous results in Israel's election, but I really have nothing to say about it. Covering Israeli politics is like picking through the trash. Your hands get dirty and all you have for your efforts are trash.

Nobody really wins in Israeli politics, except the left, which keeps retaining its fading grip on power through every dirty trick in the book from fake third parties to paid voter fraud. Once again the fake third party strategy paid off, and considering the above-average voter turnout, the voter fraud was no doubt very extensive.

Mostly though the right self-destructed, as it has in the past, with Netanyahu continuing his program of staying in power by sabotaging the right and flirting with the left. The election boiled down to people on the right denouncing each other in attack ads in increasingly petty ways and the left profited. What could have been a national turning point, instead means more of the same.

The verminous Deri is back in a big way, back from prison and taking Shas back into left-wing politics. Surreal articles describe a center-right coalition with Haredi parties. In practice such coalitions are common, but defining the Haredi parties as being to the right is wishful thinking.

While Iran develops its nuclear program and the Palestinian situation worsens, we can look forward to more years of screaming fights between the Haredi-Dati Leumi-Secularists. A fight that Netanyahu has bizarrely chosen to enlist in. We can also look forward the endless social justice debates as the Tel Aviv parties continue to hijack national politics for their own petty pseudo-Euro antics.

And that's why I have nothing to say about it. Israel's politics aren't in the worst place that they could be, but they're still in the trash. Lapid's fake party, like the preceding ones, will fall apart. There will be more accusations of corruption, more police investigations and more media employees of tycoons going on about the influence of tycoons on politics. And so it goes...

If there was ever a wrong time for a culture war, it's now. The fall of the Second Temple shows how that went last time around. But history is a cycle. It's a wheel. It goes to the same places it came from.




DOES THIS SOUND FAMILIAR?

Despondent after George W. Bush won re-election, a small group of billionaire Democrats met in San Francisco in December 2004 to reflect on John Kerry’s failure to capture the White House. George Soros, Progressive Insurance Chairman Peter B. Lewis, and S&L tycoons Herb and Marion Sandler were angry and depressed.

They felt they had been taken—seduced by the siren song of pollsters and the mainstream media who had assured them that the capture of the executive mansion was theirs. But despite giving millions of dollars to liberal candidates and 527 political committees, the donors came away with nothing. At about the same time, another group of wealthy Democratic donors was meeting at a hotel in Washington, D.C., feeling the same way. “The U.S. didn’t enter World War II until Japan bombed Pearl Harbor,” political consultant Erica Payne told the meeting. “We just had our Pearl Harbor.”

Determined to bring the Democratic Party back from the political wilderness, Soros and the others decided they needed a long-term strategy to regain power. Former Clinton official Rob Stein urged them to copy conservatives who had spent four decades investing in ideas and institutions with staying power.

We just had our Pearl Harbor too. And we need that long-term strategy before it's too late.




NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT

When Mitt Romney brought up Mali in the presidential debate, the reference was met with sneers from the left and bewilderment from the media. “Despite Romney Claims, Mali is No Afghanistan, Expert Says,” is how US News and World Report headlined the rebuttal. Three months later, it’s become increasingly clear that not only is Mali turning into Afghanistan, but North Africa is sliding down the same muddy slope.

The only thing that Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy had learned from the wars fought in Afghanistan and Iraq was to avoid the public turning on them by minimizing their casualty footprint. By avoiding troops on the ground, the trio thought that they had dodged all the problems that Bush and Blair had with Iraq. It never occurred to them that the reason Bush and Blair opted for occupation and reconstruction was to try and tamp down the resulting chaos. Despite their best efforts, their own people are coming back in body bags from Libya and Mali. And the killing has only begun.

...from my article, "North Africa Is the New Afghanistan"




JOHN KERRY: RADICAL CAREERIST

The Anti-War movement was moving into high gear even as the Vietnam War was fading away. Americans troops were leaving Vietnam in large numbers and the last American offensive in Vietnam had begun the year before. But for the Anti-War movement, the actual war was only a pretext for undermining their country and promoting themselves.

Few men fit that description better than John Forbes Kerry who had not needed a weatherman to know which way the winds of political fortune were blowing. Vietnam Veterans Against the War became the platform for an aspiring Congressman seeking to remake his image. Despite its name VVAW was as bent on attacking the men fighting the war, as the war itself. Its publicity stunts, such as Operation RAW or Kerry’s own Senate testimony, were calculated to cast returning veterans as war criminals and murderers.

Toward the end of 1971, VVAW was balanced on the edge of its own irrelevance. The publicity stunts had brought it fame and undermined America’s position in negotiating a departure from Vietnam, but the departure was still underway. Rather than speeding it up, Kerry and VVAW had slowed it down to make the most of their moment in the sun, but once the public and VVAW’s membership realized that the war really was ending, so would their popularity.

While some in the VVAW were career radicals, Kerry was a radical careerist. Leftist politics were his way up the ladder, but he never let them get in the way of his own career.

... from "John Kerry: Unfit for Duty."




IT'S NOT ALWAYS BLACK AND WHITE, SOMETIMES IT'S YELLOW

“We must never forget, brothers, to nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred for them: for Zionists, for Jews,” Mr. Morsi declared. Egyptian children “must feed on hatred; hatred must continue,” he said. “The hatred must go on for Allah and as a form of worshiping him.”

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) on Thursday defended the Obama administration’s gift of four F-16 fighter jets to Egypt despite Egyptian President Mohammad Morsi’s newly-surfaced comments.

“President Morsi has issued two statements,” Kerry said, “to clarify those comments...  But not everything, and this is always the complication in dealings with the international sector, not everything lends itself to a simple clarity, black white, this that, every time.”

Nuance. It worked for Chamberlain. It will work for Kerry who will have to navigate the difficult task of being neither black or white, but yellow.





IT'S NOT ALWAYS BLACK AND WHITE, SOMETIMES IT GLOWS GREEN IN THE DARK

“We are not disguising the fact that the various satellites and long-range rockets that we will fire and the high-level nuclear test we will carry out are targeted at the United States,” North Korea’s National Defense Commission said in a statement released by the official news service.

“Settling accounts with the U.S. needs to be done with force, not with words,” it said.

This comes not long after another one of Kerry's great diplomatic breakthroughs with North Korea.

A prominent U.S. senator met Friday with North Korea’s nuclear envoy who promised to live up to commitments made in an agreement last week with the United States.

Democrat Sen. John Kerry said that the North Korean also made a “profound statement” about wanting a different relationship and not wanting to fight with the United States.

“They said that they will live by the agreement that they made last week, that we can count on that,” Kerry, who chairs the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, told reporters.

We can count on it. We can. Yes we can.



THIS TIME IT'S PERSONAL

Colin Powell left the Republican Party on bad terms, twice, washing out of the Bush Administration, and then running to Obama out of spite at not being picked by McCain. Four years later he has nothing to show for it. The Republican Party hasn’t gotten into the White House, but neither has Colin Powell.

Powell can’t wait around another four years to see what happens in 2016, so he has nothing to lose. In 2008, he still maintained the pretense of being an objective observer looking for a transcendent figure to unite the country. Now Powell sounds shrill and angry. The accusations have become irrational and petty.

Colin Powell is pimping himself out on everything from gun control to false accusations of racism, showing how eager he is to do any of the dirty work that the Democrats might have for him.

The Colin Powell we see on the Sunday morning shows is a bitter man, angry over not getting as far as he wanted to go. It isn’t racial bitterness that Powell projects, but personal grievance. 

Colin Powell Isn’t Embarrassing the Republican Party, He’s Embarrassing Himself





OBAMA WANTED A CLEARER PICTURE IN BENGHAZI TOO

France is increasingly upset by what it sees as limited Obama administration support for the war it is waging in Mali against al Qaeda militants.

The U.S. has yet to decide on whether to agree to France’s request for U.S. planes to refuel French fighters in flight, they said. France has a small fleet of aging refueling tankers and says more are needed to maintain the tempo of air operations in remote Mali.

Obama administration officials have said they support the French campaign but want to get a clear picture of the mission and the rebels being targeted in French strikes before providing more assistance.

Obama Refusing to Provide Support for France’s Fight Against Al Qaeda




WHISKEY, SEXY, THEOCRACY

Amran Jhah Syed Ali, a 23-year-old unemployed Pakistani asylum seeker, visited the home of his Italian fiance with his Chadian friend. They took advantage of the opportunity to empty a bottle of vodka between them.

This touching scene of multi-ethnic fraternisation was brutally interrupted when the Italian woman pronounced the name of Allah in vain. Her “fiancé” then attacked her after having broken the vodka bottle in fury.

The woman took refuge in her bedroom, where she locked herself in and called the carabinieri for help, at around 1 am, while the fiancé tried to break the door down.

Among the local newspapers, the Gazetta Iblea had the headline : “Paki handcuffed in the name of Allah”.Insula Report is more balanced and without doubt more exact: “Rage in the name of Allah and vodka”

Drunk Muslim Attacks Italian Fiance W/Broken Vodka Bottle for “Taking Name of Allah in Vain”







HE ISN'T DEPRAVED, HE'S DEPRIVED

He has no trouble smashing police car windscreens with milk crates but it seems Muslim rioter Omar Halaby is not fit to work, receiving a $200-a-fortnight disability support pension.

In documents tendered to the Downing Centre Local Court, Legal Aid lawyer Sophie Edin said Halaby suffered from “certain disabilities” which had seen him claim the pension for the past three years. Ms Edin told the court. “He has literacy issues, a short attention span, things to that effect.”

We ain't no delinquents, We're misunderstood. Deep down inside us there is good!




LIBERALISM IS A STATE OF MIND

Here lies the empty head of the professional liberal. The present isn’t a year or an age, it’s a moment. A passing fleeting thing.

1791 is an eternity away. A period of time that is so vast that he can hardly conceive of it, not because of the chronological distance, but the cultural distance.

How far away is 1791? To Matthew Modine, its an infinite distance measured by every liberal social gimmick that he is wedded to. The modern liberal is not an American, he is a citizen of Liberalvania, a fanciful magical kingdom where money is infinite and everyone gets gay married and then breaks into showtunes. It’s not a real place, it’s a state of mind.

Who’s Up for Another Celebrity Lecture About Gun Control?



THE FARCE

The media maintained its embargo on President Morsi’s speeches until the New York Times chose to run a piece highlighting both the Memri released video and a second video, featured on Bassem Youssef’s show and now also translated and released by Memri, until the New York Times ran a piece on both videos. This was followed by a condemnation from the White House.

This is a show. A carefully staged show whose purpose is to divert attention from something else. And there are a number of candidates for what that something else might be.

The most obvious one is the Hagel nomination. The timing of the two are closely intertwined. Morsi’s comments had been around for a while. A staged condemnation of them however would allow the White House to posture as pro-Israel at an extremely critical period.

What is Really Behind Obama’s Condemnation of Morsi?



IT'S OBAMA'S WORLD, WE JUST LIVE IN IT

Obama’s CIA Director Pick Called for Censoring the Media

Man Banned From D.C. For Protesting Obama Inauguration

Mayor Bloomberg Doubled New York City Debt to $110 Billion

Communists Confess They Were Behind Israel’s Social Justice Protests

UN Giving Syrian Government $519 Million for Humanitarian Assistance

Muslim Brotherhood Using Benghazi as its Political Base

Algerian Attack Was Carried Out Using Weapons and Gear Provided to Libyan Rebels

Mexican Mafia Leader Sentenced for Trying to “Ethnically Cleanse” Blacks from California City

Newly Liberated Libya Rejects Attack on Mali Islamists




FLIES ON THE WALL

Baalzebub (pron.: /biːˈɛlzɨbʌb/ bee-EL-zə-bub or /ˈbiːlzɨbʌb/ BEEL-zə-bub; (Hebrew: בעל זבוב, Baʿal Zəvûv Arabic: بعل الذباب‎, Ba‘al az-Zubab;, literally "Lord of the Flies"; Greek: Βεελζεβούλ, Velzevoúl; Latin: Beelzebūb), with numerous archaic variants, is a deity that was worshiped in the Philistine city of Ekron.  

...from Lemon Lime Moon

21 Else, if thou wilt not let my people go, behold, I will send swarms of flies upon thee, and upon thy servants, and upon thy people, and into thy houses: and the houses of the Egyptians shall be full of swarms of flies, and also the ground whereon they are. -- Exodus 8

...from American Digest

The Jewish translation of that is a bit more intimidating than flies, but gnats are a good starting point.




OF MENDACIOUS DEMAGOGUERY

This kind of mendacious demagoguery flourishes when the press is biased and/or cowed, and fails to challenge the political leaders.  Every appeal from the leadership gets to be emotional; government is discussed in unaccountable, irrational, and even hysterical terms, as when the president postulated, in his speech on gun restrictions during the same press conference, that the victims of mass shootings had been “denied their rights” by the shooters.  The distinction between committing crimes against individuals, which the citizens can do, and denying the people’s rights – which only government can do – is one of the most important concepts underlying the American system of government.  But Obama elided it out of existence on Wednesday, in his quest to depict the use of firearms as, principally, a means of injuring others.

from the Optimistic Conservative




ABSOLUTE ZERO

It is the inherent, ineluctable nature of a state of zero in a person that a man who is lacking in character and values must be a destroyer. He becomes something when he is able to demonstrate his capacity for destruction. He must act to sustain the illusion. Destruction is his own proof of power.

from Rule of Reason