Friday Afternoon Roundup - The Times They are a Changin

The key question is not whether America will recover from the current managed economic decline, but whether America will be allowed to recover.

And the key factors that will determine are whether we will have a free market economy, or a socialist economy dominated by vastly expanded and empowered unions, cap and trade, and a great deal of new taxes and regulations.

Obama's new jobs program has gotten off to a good start, as he's busy running Chrysler into the ground. After slashing Chrysler's ad budget by 50 percent, the company will also be closing nearly 1/4th of its dealerships, killing 38,000 jobs.

But don't worry, while 38,000 small business jobs may have been lost... but Obama's UAW supporters will keep their jobs. And that of course was the whole point.

Use taxpayer money to bail out and handover auto companies to the UAW, and kill the dealerships. After all when the auto companies are government subsidized, who needs to sell the actual cars themselves?

But now maybe some of the 38,000 people who lost their jobs for Obama can get jobs in his booming new government employment sector, so long as they have useful skills, such as recording the GPS addresses of people's homes, rubber stamping forms or helping Rahm Emanuel and the great people at ACORN makes this the very best census ever!

Of course people with actual useful skills or sales experience need not apply. That's for the capitalist scum in the old ugly racist America. Not the happy cheerful new America that uses taxpayer funds to take over and gut American companies and turn them into lifetime employment packages for the supporters of the Beloved Leader.

And all the while Obama is pushing 60,000 new government jobs, making sure that all of America winds up with the prosperously bankrupt union tick infested economy that California already enjoys.

Meanwhile The Shining One is making sure that Israel doesn't attack Iran without notifying him, which is much the same as notifying Iran itself. Especially considering some of Obama's appointees, whose sympathies are not exactly subtle.

Meanwhile everyone on down is pressuring Israel to implement a Two State Solution ASAP, regardless of the fact that would mean creating a terrorist state inside Israel, whose leadership would include Hamas, and which has never demonstrated any willingness to stop being terrorists.

The blackmail card of course is Iran.

Speaking of radicalism and anti-semitism, the Jewish Press has an article by Rabbi Avi Weiss, traveling to the embattled Jewish community in the heart of Hugo Chavez's radical left wing dictatorship, and what life for Jews and Catholics looks like under Hugo.

I'm traveling with Shmuel Herzfeld, rabbi of the National Synagogue in Washington, D.C.; Adam Scheier, senior rabbi of Shaar Hashomayim in Montreal; and Gabe Ledeen, a former U.S. Marine who did two tours of duty in Iraq...

Our first stop is Congregation Tiferet Yisrael, the largest Sephardi synagogue, which was defiled on January 31. It was a raid carefully orchestrated by nineteen assailants, a kind of commando attack. For me, it points to deep complicity on the part of the government. It's not only that Chavez's anti-Semitic rhetoric created a climate that inspired these attacks, it was much more. I believe this was virtually state-sponsored terror...

Some U.S. defense agencies feel congressional hearings could result in a backlash against Venezuelan Jewry. So powerful is this position that it has been adopted by my own congressman, Rep. Eliot Engel, whom I consider not only a dear friend but the strongest supporter of Israel in Congress today. As chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, Rep. Engel is in a position to call for these hearings, but has decided not to do so because Venezuelan Jewry opposes it.

Here I saw and heard how well-meaning people in the American Jewish establishment had misrepresented the views of Venezuelan Jews. The position that Venezuelan Jews oppose congressional hearings is simply false. We closed the meeting holding hands around the table as we sang "Am Yisrael Chai."

In fact, the Venezuelan community has conducted itself during these difficult times in the spirit of "the people of Israel live." When Chavez demanded the Jewish community condemn Israel for the Gaza war, it adamantly refused.

"We are Zionists," the leadership of CAIV proclaimed, "we stand and will always stand with Israel."

This brief excerpt from the much larger article highlights just how ugly life gets under a left wing regime.

Meanwhile at Israpundit, Jeff Jacoby takes on the blindfold that Obama wants to stick on Lady Justice

When he voted against the confirmation of Chief Justice John Roberts in 2005, Obama declared that the “truly difficult” cases that come before the Supreme Court can be decided only with reference to “the depth and breadth of one’s empathy,” and that “the critical ingredient is supplied by what is in the judge’s heart.”

But such cardiac justice is precisely what judges “do solemnly swear” to renounce. Sympathy for others is an admirable virtue, but a judge’s private commiserations are not relevant to the law he is expected to apply.

If Obama means what he says, he wants judges who can be counted on to violate their oath of office.

“We need somebody who’s got the heart — the empathy — to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom,” he told a Planned Parenthood conference in 2007. “The empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old. And that’s the criteria by which I’m going to be selecting my judges.”

With such criteria, what would remain of the rule of law? What would happen to “Equal Justice Under Law,” which is carved above the Supreme Court’s entrance? What would be left of the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of “equal protection of the laws” to every citizen?

That amendment of course is in shoddy shape already, along with much of the Constitution. What's left then is a Victim Value Index, and class and racial warfare, the key ingredients of the left's current rise to power in America.

At Canada Free Press, Tony Magana suggests that Congress should investigate the McKiernan firing, and has a different take on it from that of the mainstream media.

Just this week, Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton said she “deeply, deeply” regretted the loss of civilians in Western Afghanistan which the Red Cross counted as 120 from American military actions. Afghan President Hamid Karzai had called the deaths “unacceptable ” which occurred while he was in Washington DC meeting with President Obama.

Gen. David McKiernan disagreed with President Karzai that these most recent deaths were the result of American military action. His staff said that American Marines were assisting Afghan forces who had been ambushed and blamed the civilian casualties on the Taliban. The Associated Press says two senior officials who wished to remain anonymous stated that a Taliban leader had ordered his men to use hand grenades on the civilians.

Nice Deb and Texas Darlin have their own updates and photo analysis of the New York Air Scare One flyover

Yoram Ettinger forwards a Haaretz article on the Demographic scare program panicking some Israeli leaders toward a Two State Solution, which was also behind the Gaza Disengagement. This may also have eventual implications for Muslim growth rates in Europe.

DragonDirt has the Obama card

At Family security Matters, the question is, Will Obama try to Force a Two State Solution on Israel?

At Right Side News, a warning that Obama is stacking his administration with Islamists.

On January 8th, the Congressional Muslim Staffers Association sent out an email announcing that they would be hosting an inaugural gala titled, "Muslim Inauguration Gala". Guests included Congressman Keith Ellison, (D-MN), Cong. Andre Carson (D-IN), "Representatives of the Obama Administration", Rev. Walter Fauntroy (DC-Delegate), Zaid Shakir and Hamza Yusef (of the Zaytuna Institute), Fmr. Capt. James Yee, Senegalese President Abduolaye Wade, CAIR Michigan Director, Dawud Walid, and Johari Abdul-Malik of the Muslim Alliance of North America. This list reads like a Who's Who of leading Islamists in the United States, all of whom share the ideological framework of political Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Now that anyone should be surprised after the Muslim Brotherhood, read Hamas and Al Queda, were represented at Obama's Inauguration.

And Right Side News looks at more Obama generated layoffs

That's all for the weekend