Friday Afternoon Roundup - an Orwellian Deficit, the Racist Ball and the Border That Isn't There

White Houses Announces Plan to Cut Deficit, by using Deficit Spending to Triple the National Debt.

Does that make any sense to you? Because it sure doesn't make any sense to me.

In George Orwell's Animal Farm, the 7 rules that the animals lived by continued to change by Napoleon's fiat, even as none of the other animals could remember what they used to be. So "Two Legs Bad, Four Legs Good" became "Four Legs Good, Two Legs Better."

The press under Obama has switched to enthusiastically braying, "Deficit Reduction Good, Deficit Spending Better."

For anyone who wondered how to tell when the Orwellian age was here, it would be when the press describes a politician's plan to triple the national debt using deficit spending, as a plan to cut the deficit. All the better because the politician's first wave of campaigning involved a commercial secretly done by one of his own employees and planted as a "viral video" that exploited Orwell in order to criticize his opponent as manipulative and totalitarian.

Obama's spending plan has all the economic wisdom of a teenager shopping for electronics and paying for it with one credit, while paying the credit card bill with another credit card. That kind of inability to understand the consequences of spending money you don't actually have, helped get us into this mess in the first place.

Meanwhile however taxpayers will be dunned billions for the "virtual nationalization" of Citigroup, a bank whose largest shareholders are Saudi Prince Alaweed Bin Talal and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. Can Sharia finance be far behind?

Mississippi Democratic Congressman Gene Taylor has wisely pointed out that, "deficit spending is not change."

Mississippi Democratic Rep. Gene Taylor blasted the budget outline President Obama submitted to Capitol Hill today, saying “I don’t like it…change is not running up even bigger deficits that George Bush did.”

“That’s what George Bush did very well. Apparently that’s what President Obama is doing.”
As a member of the Armed Service Committee, Taylor noted the budget only gives the Defense Department a “small increase,” which he said would barely cover the cost of living adjustments for the military.

Taylor pointed to President Obama’s inaugural address that called for Americans to make sacrifices, saying “It’s certainly not reflected in his budget.”

But it's asking too much to expect the press to ask the tough questions. Not when they can instead report on such vital breaking stories as which dog Obama picked, and how to get toned arms like Michelle Obama. Who has the time to contemplate the impact of 20+ Trillion dollar deficit on our children, when we can instead look at new photos of Sasha or read about some lunatic who sent supposed AIDS tainted blood to Obama.

Four legs good, two legs better.

Of course that situation is hardly limited to the United States. Melanie Philips points out that the cost of a conventional political system ignoring a real crisis is the rise of something explosive.

While the media minutely scrutinise Harriet Harman’s ambition, Jacqui Smith’s expenses and David Cameron’s taste in clothes, a lower form of political pond life altogether is expanding like duck-weed.

Last week, the British National Party won a council seat in Sevenoaks, Kent. The reason for its increasing success is obvious. Like all populist, neo-fascist parties, the BNP is opportunistically exploiting the failure by the political establishment to address issues of pressing and legitimate concern to the public.
...
At a more profound and altogether more explosive level, however, is the fact that all three parties not only refuse to address the issues that concern the public most deeply and emotionally, but also demonise those who express such anxieties as racists or fascists.

In particular, they have colluded in a refusal to acknowledge that nationalism — or attachment to one’s own country and its values — is a perfectly respectable, even admirable, sentiment.
Instead, anyone who maintains that British culture and identity are rooted in the history, language, literature, religion and laws of this country — and must be defended as such against erosion, undermining or outright attack — is vilified as a racist or xenophobe. This effectively presents such people with a choice — between being demonised as racists and standing silently by as their culture evaporates.

For Britain is changing before our very eyes. As a result of the current rate of immigration, within half a century the projected steep increase in the UK’s population will be entirely made up of people not born in Britain — most of whom will have come from the Third World.

Meanwhile, the fanatically imposed doctrine of multiculturalism has brought about the erosion or denigration of Britain’s history, religion and identity, leaving generations of children — both indigenous and immigrant — appallingly ignorant of the common culture they need to share.
It is entirely reasonable to want one’s country to express its own culture through its institutions, laws and practices. Yet those who defend this principle are called ‘racist’.

Britain is witnessing an alarming growth of separate Muslim enclaves ruled by a parallel Islamic Sharia law. It is entirely reasonable to want one system of law for all. Yet those who say so are called ‘Islamophobic’.

And that of course is inevitable. When the powerful combination of the press and the political establishment marginalize and denounce a mainstream and widespread idea in order to create an enforced "moderation", there will always be those who hop on board and cultivate them.

If you denounce legitimate criticism of Islam or the cost of immigration as racist or fascist, you wind up with the issue in the domain of real racists and fascists. Whether it's the BNP in the UK or Le Pen in France or Avigdor Lieberman in Israel, when mainstream parties are timid, they put the ball in the court of parties and politicians who are not afraid of being denounced as racists or fascists. Often because that's exactly what they are.


The same phenomenon has not quite happened in America yet, mainly because the far right still hates Jews more than it worries about Muslims, but it has already ably exploited America's huge problem with debt and the expanding Federal government, as Ron Paul's candidacy demonstrates. Immigration in the US, as in the UK, is a populist area that Republicans too often shun, leaving it in the hands of the far right.

As McCain and now Jindal are aptly demonstrating, the Republicans cannot win by being a tame moderation party that eschews anything but some imaginary center. Cameron has demonstrated that in the UK. As the Likud has in Israel. You can't win by giving up your principles. At best you can win a battle and lose the war.
Fortunately there are plenty of Republicans who continue to hold strong positions on these issues. And Obama's Reign of Economic Terror is making questioning the size of the Federal government and the national debt, more mainstream than ever in the Republican party. Now that just needs to be translated into party strategy.

Melanie Philips' column, the rise of the BNP or Yisrael Beiteinu however should be fair warning to the Republican party that if it insists on being a RINO party, it will see its own equivalent of the BNP rising to steal its thunder. Ron Paul was only an opening shot. If the GOP doesn't embrace its priniciples now when it has the chance, it will be far more difficult to do so when it's losing former red states to a third party.

Speaking of Israel meanwhile, the coalition talks continue to drag on endlessly, with every site playing its usual hand, with the predictable and inevitable outcome. Kadima ironically enough, wants to be in the Opposition, though it has no actual principles or ideas. Labor's Barak, who actually has some ideas if not principles, wanted to be in a coalition, but was forbidden by his own party.

That drags everything back into a drawn out struggle over Lieberman and the religious parties. Just the sort of thing to make the Israeli public disgusted with everyone involved. That being the usual outcome in Israeli politics.

Lieberman's article supporting the creation of a Palestinian Arab state naturally should have surprised no one, as in the Huckabee mold, his nationalistic bark has always been louder than his liberal bite. But it's part of Lieberman's strategy to sell himself to a wider audience, bringing closer his ambition to become Prime Minister. Lieberman has repeatedly told people over the years that he wants to be PM, and playing the nationalist, is only one strategy of many he's used to bring himself closer to that stage. The genuinely depressing part is that he may make it yet.

Looking over the blogsphere,

Maggie's Notebook blogs on the developing crisis on the Mexican border, with Texas Governor Perry asking for troops.

The escalating border violence has prompted Texas Governor Rick Perry to ask for troops to guard the border. This week Juárez Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz moved his family to El Paso for safety.

According to Tuesday's El Paso Times, El Paso police are investigating the possibility that elements of the Juárez drug cartel may cross the border into the United States to come after Juárez Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz and his family.

With Pheonix already as the kidnapping capital of the US, the situation will only get worse. Ferriz moving his family across the border is no solution, because the truth is that there is no border anymore.


The Mexican border is a formality, because Mexico exists on both sides of the Rio Grande. The Mexican flags waved at immigration rallies, the rising presence of the cartels and cartel related violence on this side of the border, and the formal use of Spanish, are all statements that Mexico exists in the US as well. Mexico's second greatest source of revenue remains money sent from the US to back home.


The only difference is that Mexico does not have actual sovereignity on the US side of the border, but it's up in the air whether Mexico will have any sovereignity on their side of the border, or whether we'll have sovereignity on our side of the border either.

Neo Con Express meanwhile has the Obama budget deficit graph, displayed above.


Via Dragon Dirt, an essay asking Where's the Outrage About Saudi Arabia

Whew, what a relief to no longer have a president so intimately tied to the Saudi royal family. Thanks to a whole cottage industry of New York Times bestsellers like Craig Unger’s House of Bush, House of Saud and hit movies like Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, the nefarious relationship between “the world’s two most powerful dynasties” was exposed. Surely, now that we’re empowered to recognize a Saudi-controlled White House, people like Craig Unger and Michael Moore will have no problem rallying their fans, through more books and films, to reject President Obama’s suspicious obsequiousness toward the Saudis: Obama gave his first official interview as president to the partially Saudi-owned Al-Arabiya network. During that interview, he singled out Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah for his “great courage.” Obama has since selected as head of the National Intelligence Council a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia named Chas Freeman. Freeman has acknowledged the “generosity of Crown Prince Abdullah” in helping him in such endeavors as peddling a Saudi textbook full of nasty lies about Israel.

It will be interesting to see intrepid journalists and media mavens hot on the case of the Obama-Saudi connection.

Speaking of Freeman, Melanie Philips continues her coverage of him, and cites this blog as well

Chas W Freeman has now been confirmed as Obama’s pick for the chairmanship of America’s National Intelligence Council. This appointment, to a post which oversees production of America’s National Intelligence Estimates and shapes America’s understanding of the threat posed by the world’s rogue regimes and terror organisations, has caused even Obama supporters to choke into their cappuccinos. For Freeman is not simply, as I wrote here, in the pocket of Saudi Arabia, with ties to the bin Laden family after 9/11. Seven months after 9/11, he told the Washington Institute:

I accept that al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden almost certainly perpetrated the September 11 attacks.

Note the "Almost Certainly" part of this.

Via NavyVet48, in the comments, the local CBS affiliate's Marcia Kramer has a hard hitting story on the Jewish reaction to Hillary Clinton's transformation on Israel.

"I'm a very strong supporter of Israel," Clinton said back in February 2000.

On Thursday, as Secretary of State she had yet another about face in the form of angry messages demanding Israel speed up aid to Gaza. Jewish leaders are furious.

"I am very surprised, frankly, at this statement from the United States government and from the secretary of state," said Mortimer Zuckerman, publisher of the New York Daily News and member of the NYC Jewish Community Relations Council.

"I liked her a lot more as a senator from New York," Assemblyman Dov Hikind, D-Brooklyn, said. "Now, I wonder as I used to wonder who the real Hillary Clinton is."

The answer of course, like most politicians, is she is who she needs to be at a given moment.

Elder of Ziyon has more insight into that transformation in The Water in the State Department.

Islamic Danger to Americans has the text from an Imaginary Speech by Obama

Yes, you can see a day where every Saudi, every Egyptian, Syrian, Iranian, and Pakistani has the same opportunity. But that needs real change, real education, real human rights. It is time for the Muslim world and its nations to honor the rights and opportunities of every one of its citizens who happen to come from outside the tribes in control.

Every human being living in Saudi Arabia should have the right to build a house of worship, not only Muslims. Theocrats have enabled a shar'ia based legal system which is an anathema to liberty and basic human rights –all in the name of the religion of Islam.

Of course as the appointment of a Saudi lobbyist demonstrates, it will always be an imaginary speech.

Meanwhile Atlas Shrugs features Part Two of How Muslim Theory Suppresses Women

Long before the U.S. declared itself a nation, however, America gave women at large great respect. The Uxbridge, Mass. town fathers in 1756 granted the young widow Lydia Taft the right to vote in local matters, for example. America again showed its respect for women in 1789 when the states ratified the U.S. Constitution, inferring rights to women amongst "We the people of the United States," when early 19th century suffragette Abby Kelley Foster first sought votes for women, and in 1869 when Susan B. Anthony's formed the National Woman Suffrage Association.

Voting rights would never have accrued to American women, moreover, without their basic and universal right to free speech and their right "peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances," as guaranteed in the First Amendment, drafted and ratified in 1791.

Nowhere in the world, by contrast, does Islam grant such rights to women, either political or religious. Far from it. Current Islamic teaching more or less parallels that of the 7th century original. In October 2006, for example, former Australian Mufti Sheikh Taj Aldin al-Hilali described women as "uncovered meat" in a sermon at Sydney's Lakemba mosque. Similarly, Muslim Brotherhood spiritual chief Yusuf Qaradawi, widely recognized as Islam's "greatest" living scholar, in the Status of Women in Islam derides any woman having "free rein to assert herself, promote her personality, enjoy her life and her femininity... mix with men freely, experience them closely where they would be together and alone, travel with them, go to cinemas or dance till midnight together."

...

he global Muslim war on free speech is best exemplified by verbal and legal attacks on Dutch freedom fighter and Member of Parliament Geert Wilders, who has for years required non-stop personal security protection, now faces trial at home for his truthful statements quoting the Qur'an, and was recently barred entry to the U.K. This is all the work of advocates for global shari'a rule.

As we've previously noted at Right Side News, several large North American Muslim organizations also advocate global imposition of Islamic law, which prohibits "defamation" of Islam and Mohammed. For Muslims who leave the faith or "blaspheme" against Islam or Mohammed, the punishment is death, a statute on the books in several Muslim states, and widely enforced by mob rule in others. Non-Muslims may not criticize Islam or Mohammed, either. Pakistan's hudud code enforces shari'a laws on everyone, Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Iran, Saudi Arabia and Sudan also enforce hudud laws. According to Islamic scholars, these statutes apply to all of mankind.