Friday Afternoon Roundup - Red and Green All Over

From Adam Taxin's roundup of cartoon responses to Arizona decision

A FEW STATISTICS

31% of Americans give Obama positive grade on handling economic issues

36% of Americans, about 80 million people, believe UFO's exist.

If aliens arrived at their doorstep. 22% of that 36 percent would try to befriend the alien, 15% would run away, 13% would lock their doors, and only 2% would try to inflict bodily harm.

... the other 48 percent would vote him in as President.



MUSLIM WITCH HUNTS

While liberals complain that investigations of Islamic terrorism are a witch hunt, it's a good idea to remind them that while America doesn't hunt witches... the Muslim world does.

In the Maldives, Sheikh Abdullah Bin Mohamed called for the passage of an Anti-Sorcery Act. The Maldives already has its own witch hunts and in 1993 arrested a witch for giving magic scrolls to a presidential candidate to help him win an election—a novel form of electoral fraud.

Black magic is also a serious problem in the United Arab Emirates. In non-Muslim countries airport security personnel screen for Muslim terrorists carrying explosives and weapons; but in Muslim countries, the local equivalent of the TSA searches for magic wands and potions. Vigilant security personnel at Abu Dhabi International Airport caught one such would-be Harry Potter trying to enter the UAE.

“The airport staff suspected the passenger, so they inspected his luggage and found books that contained spells, mostly in unknown languages, and some suspicious tools which seem to be used for black magic,” said Colonel Rashid Bursheed, the head of the organized crime section at the Criminal Investigations Department.

...that's a short selection from my article on Muslim Witch Hunts, which looks behind the facade of civilization created by skyscrapers and internet cafes to show a culture still battling sorcerers, fighting Djinns and hunting witches.





OPPOSING COMPULSORY HEALTH INSURANCE PURCHASES IS JUST LIKE SLAVERY

If you oppose ObamaCare, you might as well buy a slave, work him into his old age and then abandon him by the side of the road... or something.

No really. Frank Harris III at the Hartford Courant says so.

I'll skip the part where I fisk his thesis because it's too easy and it avoids dealing with larger pathology displayed in the article.

Talking about slavery makes folks uncomfortable. It was so long ago, I know. And doggone it Frank, what do you mean doing what you are about to do: proclaim those jilted Republicans as acting out a slave-era legacy in their opposition to the Supreme Court's ruling that found "Obamacare" constitutional...

Those who had the least suffered the most when it came to health then, just as they do today. Life expectancy for the poor — And who was poorer than a slave? — was far below that of whites. Life expectancy for blacks today remains and has always been lower than whites. Infant mortality is high, too...

It's 2012 and Republicans seem determined to rally their supporters against health care like the Confederacy rallied its citizens against the North's efforts to destroy their slave-based way of life.

Let's unpack the reasoning here.

1. Blacks were slaves then and we didn't take care of their health.

2. We are still not taking care of their health.

Connecting A to B is the work of a man who on some level still sees black people as slaves who need to be "saved" and "taken care of" because they cannot take care of themselves.

Liberals rarely put forward this formula quite so openly, but it's at the heart of the old elitist  liberalism. Harris is accusing us of being "irresponsible slaveowners". We aren't taking care of our black people.

Think about the Emancipation Proclamation, think about Juneteenth and the Fourth of July, and think about the whole rotten assumption that rather than setting everyone free, what we really need is a massive slave state for everyone built on the power of guilt. Think about the contempt for black people who are being treated as if they have no ability to take care of themselves. And think about how pervasive this reasoning is in liberal thinking.

Harris accuses us of protecting a "slave-based way of life", but who really has the slave-based way of life? Is it the people who want slaves or the people who don't want slaves? Is it the people who believe that we should be free or the people who believe we should be subservient to the proper authorities who will care for us?

The assumption made by Harris is the same one made by slaveowners, that  black people cannot care for themselves. That they must be wards... for their own good. Post-slavery the argument becomes that we must all be wards... for the good of black people.

How much of the welfare state squats on the obscene proposition that black people are unable to take care of themselves?

How much of the misery and troubles of black people in America comes from all the do-gooders who have helped wreck their finances and communities with freebies, subsidies, privileges and leaders who want nothing more than to control where the freebies go?

How many black children have been snatched away from their families to be raised by benevolent white people? How many imported from Africa for the same purpose? 

Does it end at our borders? Absolutely not.

How many articles have there been written about the damage done to Africa's domestic industries by the volumes of aid sent there by Westerners? Textiles, construction and agriculture are in trouble because Africa is swamped with foreign aid by white people who want to take care of all the black people who can't take care of themselves.

Do that anywhere and it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more people are treated as unable to fend for themselves, the less likely they are to fend for themselves, and the more charity they need, until the process becomes completely unsustainable.

Turning an entire race into charity cases should be considered a war crime, instead of a humanitarian act.

Building a system of political rule based on an entire race being treated as a charity case is racism and tyranny mixed together into an ugly combination. And yet it is the basis for liberal political power.





IT'S ANOTHER DEMOCRATIC TRIUMPH FOR THE ARAB SPRING

Libya's top politicians have hatched a deal that would see the Muslim Brotherhood lead the government after the country's first free elections in almost five decades takes place on Sunday. 

Aren't you glad Obama fought an illegal war in blatant violation of the War Powers Act for this? Just wait until he pulls the same trick in Syria.

Two countries under the Brotherhood already and Hussein O won't stop until he makes it three, using what's left of the military after his rape of the armed forces.



REMEMBER THAT RIGHT-WING SUPREME COURT?

It's not really right-wing at all.

The myth of a right-wing Supreme Court can be seen in recent statistics which show that Kagan has been in the majority more often than Scalia and that on divided cases, the gap between majority status for the more conservative members of the court, Alito and Thomas, and between Sotomayor, is at ten percent. The justices most likely to be in the majority are the swingers, Kennedy and Roberts, who are far likelier to be in the majority than any of their more conservative colleagues.

This is not a right-wing court; it is a swinger’s court where the swing vote is everything. The swing vote is the deciding factor and it is also the ticket to earning the praise of the media and the cocktail party circuit. And despite the Constitution and the will of the people, the direction of the swing is to the left.

...that's an excerpt from my article at Front Page Mag... Swingers of the Supreme Court




GOOD NEWS FROM SYRIA

Iraq's top diplomat on Thursday said he had "solid information" that Al Qaeda militants were crossing from Iraq to Syria to carry out attacks, warning of a violent spillover that could shake the Middle East.

...it's almost like Assad isn't the worst case scenario or something.





ISN'T THIS HOW THE TEA PARTY GOT STARTED?

"When ordinary folks start standing up for themselves, start making their voices heard, start coming together, start believing again, nothing can stop us."

—President Obama in Maumee, Ohio earlier today.

Ordinary folks standing up for themselves and making their voices heard is how O lost his congressional majority and why his election is endangered. Does he really want to encourage more of it?

That bulletin was posted by Salim Zymet, Digital Organizer at Obama for America.




BETTING ON AMERICA IN A BUS MADE IN CANADA

Barry the Gambler is hitting the road in his "Betting on America" tour and he's really connecting with the farmers and workers of the nation with speeches like this.

When the American auto industry was on the brink of collapse, and more than 1 million jobs were on the line, Governor Romney said we should just let Detroit go bankrupt. I refused to turn my back on communities like this one. I was betting on the American worker and I was betting on American industry. And three years later, the American auto industry is coming roaring back. That Chrysler plant up the road bringing on another 1,100 employees to make the cars that the world wants to buy.

Chrysler is actually Fiat now so it's an Italian car company with plants in America. How is that any different than Toyota which is a Japanese car company with plants in America?

And Barry is betting so hard on America that his "Betting on America" bus tour is happening in a bus made in Canada. Maybe Gamblin Barry has a fallback position. Prime Minister of Canada.

There's good news for Barry Hussein in this regard. Canada allows foreign born Prime Ministers. As long as he gets citizenship, he can start betting on Pakistani workers or Canadian workers or French workers. Or Uzbek workers.

In an apparent effort to soothe concerns that the United States will abandon Central Asian as soon as its engagements in Afghanistan are wound down, investments enthusiastically backed by Washington are trickling in.

General Motors stepped up its local presence in November by opening a new engine plant. The GM Uzbekistan joint venture, in which the U.S. company controls a 25 percent stake, provides work for around 6,600 people and turns out 200,000 Chevrolet passenger vehicles annually.

Obama. Betting on America... by way of Uzbekistan.



IF ONLY THERE WAS SOME WAY WE COULD HAVE THE ADVANCED EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM OF SAUDI ARABIA...

"America will never tap into educational innovation and ingenuity without looking at the model that we have in our Madrassas, in our schools where innovation is encouraged. Where the foundation is the Koran," Rep. Andre Carson (D-Indiana) 

It's a pity that thus far America has not managed to tap into the educational innovation and ingenuity that has made Muslim countries into world leaders in technology and beating women.

If only we had a system of education based on the ravings of a 7th century warlord, then we could truly tap into the best that 7th Century Arabia had to offer the world. Like believing in Djinns and drinking camel urine as a curative.

Oddly, despite the backwardness of our educational system, Saudi and Pakistani students seem to flock here for a higher education. Maybe they feel sorry for us. Or maybe we just have a lot of tall buildings for them to study while taking flight lessons. Who knows.




...SO LONG AS HE DOESN'T GET THROWN UNDER IT

"New Bedford man wins bus ride with President Obama"

With all the prizes and contests where the prize is spending time with O, when are we going to get, "Win Obama's Job"?



PRISONERS OF VIRTUE

Feudalism is back.

Half the country expects you to work from planting to harvest, at which point they will take their share. If there is not enough from the peasantry this year, the feudal Lords and their retainers will borrow it from future years. You get what is left over. They also expect that you will work the entire year, so the place will not fall apart. Unlike the Medieval days, you are not required to practice for war after the harvest is in. The Lords have plenty of retainers who will do what they're told.

You are enslaved by your own virtue. They have you convinced there is no way out of this place, without betrayal of your own virtue.

...from a comment at American Digest.

This is a very important point. Combining a First World economy in a country of hundreds of millions with a police state is tricky at best. Building a social consensus on guilt and virtue, and the virtue of guilt, is much more effective. It's religion without the religion. It's the faith of social justice that has been embedded in the country for over a century and a half. The long march of progress.

The ideas are rarely expressed as openly as the Harris column above, but they are the same ideas.

We have an eternal moral debt to repay for our prosperity. If we wish to be good people, we must go on paying the debt, rather than walk away from a social justice dependent population that's underwater.




I BET HE BELIEVES IT NOW...

A Norwegian jihadist thought to have received Al-Qaeda training in Yemen was previously a left-wing radical who refused to believe that Osama Bin Laden’s network carried out the September 11th terrorist attacks

THE SIX STEPS OF AN ISLAMIC COURTSHIP

Step 1. "He told me that he had started liking me and that I should convert to Islam and marry him."

Step 2. “He started criticizing Christians for not observing the purdah [covering of women] and of following our ‘own brand of religion,’”

Step 3. "He was acting like a mad man. He started cursing my family and even tried to set the house on fire.”

Step 4. "Adnan raped me while his friend filmed the entire incident. They ruined my life completely."

Step 5. “At first he demanded that I convert to Islam, and only then would he consider forgiving me for refusing his proposal,”

Step 6. "He turned up at my home and showed the film to my parents. He then told my shocked family that they had no other option but to hand me over to him … he told them that he ‘owned’ me now.”





AMERICA'S FIRST ONE DROP OF BLOOD PRESIDENT

‎"First thing that always pops into my head regarding our president is that all of the people who are setting up this barrier for him ... they just conveniently forget that Barack had a mama, and she was white — very white American, Kansas, middle of America," Freeman said. "There was no argument about who he is or what he is. America's first black president hasn't arisen yet. He's not America's first black president — he's America's first mixed-race president."

So maybe next time we can do a DNA test to make sure that the man we vote for has absolutely no white blood cells in him and is as racially pure as Morgan Freeman wants him to be.





SYRIAN REFUGEES ARE THE NEW PALESTINIAN REFUGEES

Um Hazifa, another refugee from Homs, lives in Baddawi, a Palestinian refugee camp north of Tripoli. She said 20 family members who have also fled the conflict sleep in the apartment, crowding the floor with thin mattresses. “Here in Baddawi, the houses are cheapest,” she said.

Give her another month and she'll be collecting UNRWA money and brandishing giant keys from her "true home" in a village in Israel. No wonder the number of "Palestinian refugees" keeps growing.




ONE LEFT-WING CORRUPTOCRAT HELPS OUT ANOTHER

The Mexican people are more stunned than excited by Enrique Peña Nieto’s apparent victory in Sunday’s presidential election. No one has taken to the streets to celebrate the return of the old Party of the Institutional Revolution (PRI). To the contrary, thousands of youth congregated at the Revolution Monument in downtown Mexico City to protest against the “imposition” of Peña Nieto through media manipulation, vote-buying, and ballot-tampering. Meanwhile, waves of people who sold their vote to the PRI on Sunday in exchange for gift cards flooded local supermarkets on Monday to cash in on their payments.

...

Peña Nieto is heading down the same road. Instead of waiting for the official results, he has already started to put together his “transition team” and presents himself in the U.S. media as “president-elect”. This is false self-representation; according to Mexico’s highly sophisticated electoral laws, only the electoral tribunal can name a candidate president-elect after a full review of the legality of the election. And preliminary reports suggest that thousands of irregularities have tainted the results.

But President Obama has agreed to play Peña Nieto’s game. On Monday, Obama called the Mexican candidate to congratulate him prematurely for his “victory.”

....Why wouldn't Obama support another corrupt leftist thug? And Nieto's tactics, including a preemptive transition, look a lot like Obama's tactics. Anyone remember Obama's pre-presidential seal?



SO MANY SPOKESPEOPLE AND NOTHING TO SAY

 For the first time this campaign cycle, President Obama is being accompanied by two spokespeople - one for the presidency and one for the campaign.

White House press secretary Jay Carney and new traveling campaign press secretary Jen Psaki tag-teamed the gaggle with reporters on Air Force One on Thursday. Carney took questions on the administration's filing of a trade complaint against China (not politically motivated, he says) and Psaki interjected slights against Mitt Romney (who opposed a similar complaint in 2009, she says).

Counting the teleprompter that's three.




JUST CLOSE YOUR EYES AND THINK OF SYRIA

U.S. must arm Syria rebels despite Islamists: opposition

Islamists are among the most effective fighters against the Syrian leadership, some opposition figures said, and Washington needs to know that while these rebels are conservative Muslims they are a far cry from Afghan-style jihadi militants.

...well that's good. We just close our eyes and think of Syria, not Afghanistan. Except...

An al-Qaida-inspired group claimed responsibility for dozens of attacks across Syria

Well they are effective. What else do we need to know?




...WELL THAT FIXES IT

The parents of a Muslim university student convicted of a religiously motivated attack on young Jews said: “Our son is no racist.”

Mohammad Khalifa, 19, was fined for hurling eggs and yelling “Oi, Jews” and “f***ing Jews” at passers-by while driving his father’s BMW through Golders Green with three friends.

But his father, a paediatrician, today claimed the victims had misheard and the students had shouted “Oi, you.”

...it's nice that in the midst of Islamophobic Britain, where Muslims are routinely persecuted, Mo's father can still manage to own a BMW.





I DON'T KNOW WHY IT'S SO HARD TO BELIEVE...

"Muslims are well-integrated in Britain – but no one seems to believe it" - (The Guardian)

"London 2012 Olympics: Muslim converts held over 'Games plot'‎" (The Telegraph)




URI L'TZEDEK, TAV HAYOSHER AND BDS

Left-wing fake Orthodox group Uri L'Tzedek is talking up its Tav HaYosher union certification. Meanwhile Elisheva Goldberg, its Rosh Beit Medrash is promoting BDS, boycotts of Israel, at Peter Beinart's blog.

How many restaurants who display the Tav HaYosher seal are comfortable with a group, one of whose leading members promotes boycotts of Israel?

Next time you see a Tav HaYosher certificate in a restaurant, you might want to ask the owner that./




THE OLYMPIC SPIRIT AND ISLAM

The Saudi Sports Minister and Head of the Olympic Committee Prince Nawaf Al-Faisal outlining the conditions for female participation in any international athletics event, including the Olympics.

"The female athlete's male guardian must give his permission and accompany her to any competitions," Prince Nawaf told the paper. Women also have to "wear appropriate Islamic dress" (which likely includes a headscarf and loose-fitting garments) and "there must be no mixing with men during any game".

To ensure no one is tempted to stray, the woman and her male guardian must both sign a pledge vowing to abide by these conditions before she would be allowed to compete.

And if she does violate them, she had better be a long-distance runner. But there are solutions coming for Muslim female athletes who don't want to wear the Hijab.

They can just become slaves.

He argued that, when it comes to marriage, "we Muslims have overly complicated things," so that men are often forced to be single throughout their prime, finally getting married between the ages of 30-40 (when they might be expected to have a sufficient income to open a household). Similarly, many Egyptian women do not want to wear the hijab in public.

The solution, according to Awn, is to reinstitute sex-slavery—allowing men to marry and copulate much earlier in life, and women who want to dress freely to do so, as technically they are sex-slaves and mandated to go about loosely attired, anyway.

Orwell had nothing on Mohammed. Just when you think you hit bottom, there's actually a much worse bottom under it. And one under that.




THE MOST IMPORTANT THING ABOUT CONSTITUTIONS...

I've seen two modified founding documents. The Soviet Constitution modified to application in the United States and Walter Russell Mead has rewritten the Declaration of Independence, but the most important thing about constitutions is that they either matter or they don't.

The Soviet Constitutions were so much toilet paper. Fancy toilet paper, but toilet paper nevertheless. Laws only matter if the authorities are bound by them. Constitutions only matter if they act as a source of power outside the current power structure. There are a number of ways to insure this, from respect for tradition to an active citizenry that uses it as a legal weapon against the authorities.

The more absolute and centralized a system is, the less such things matter. We can have a Constitution that promises infinite free candy or the equality of height or any ridiculous thing in the world. They're just words, like the noises that come out of Obama's mouth. They mean nothing.

If law is just what the elites want done at a given time, whether it's a unilateral DREAM Act or gay marriage or free candy backed by a candy mandate and candy tax, then a constitution is just a piece of paper.



ROMNEY IS RICH, RICH, RICH OFFSHORER

"Mystery Bermuda-based company and other undisclosed Romney assets hint at larger wealth."

Doug Ross asks,

Speaking of offshore, anyone care to question why the Obama campaign is fundraising in Europe? I wonder how it's ensuring contributions are all from domestic sources?

 ...speaking of... Romney is at a Chicago fundraiser while George Clooney is headlining a fundraiser for Obama in Geneva.




MA BARKER'S GANG

The states are the pot proposing to call gang-leader Kate "Ma" Barker black. One could view the conundrum from this perspective: The federal government is Ma Barker, obese, sly, and accustomed to having fancy and expensive things got through her sons' criminal activities; the states are her dependent, obedient, fiscally-challenged offspring. This criminal association creates an image it will be hard for the states to shake, or reconcile with their "principled" opposition to Obamacare, or even deny. You can bet that the federals will remind them of this and their friends in the mainstream will make a lot of noise about it.

The leftist mainstream media have served the federal government for decades now in a triple role: press agent, shill, and graffiti artist. You can count on the MSM to contribute their own confusion, ignorance, and collectivist biases to the fight the conservative governors and legislatures are spoiling for.

Forgotten, however, in all the chatter, lawsuits, and braggadocio over which governments claim prerogative supremacy over clashing legislation – the federal or the states – is the supremacy of the individual who owns his own life and the necessary and proper primacy of his liberty. Denied the recognition that he owns his own life, and seeing the primacy of his liberty negotiated away or simply erased from law, man becomes a part-time or full-time indentured serf. 

From Edward Cline, a friend of this blog, at Rule of Reason



A MESSAGE FROM OCCUPIED FRANCE

Finally, A Message from Occupied France, from Adam Taxin, who has provided invaluable help in preparing articles and reading them as well.