London Paper: The Proflagate President - by Israpundit

THE LONDON PAPER ABOUT OBAMA’S VISIT.

Posted on June 4, 2011 by a12iggymom

Makes one think how much money he has spent on his vacations, golf games, and other perks?
If you’re not sure what “big government” implies, take a look at this.


But you have already read about this in your local newspaper.

Oh no, you didn’t? OK then, you saw it on CNN… No?… INTERESTING!!!


You and I may never see health care again the way it used to be, but “Emperor Obama” took six (6) doctors with him for a 3 day visit to London – along with 494 other essential staff. Can you imagine the cost to us as taxpayers? And only 50% of us actually pay taxes in this country. Are you happy with the abuse of our money? Hell NO! This idiot in the white house, deserved to be charged with theft of gov’t property at a bare minimum. He is a Chicago crook.

Posted by Ted Belman @ 5:26 pm - Israpundit

A River of Race Runs Through It - by Sultan Knish

MONDAY, JUNE 6, 2011


Last week, Congressman Clyburn reached into his deck, discarded the queens, aces and jokers, and played the 'Race Card'. "The fact of the matter is, the president’s problems are in large measure because of the color of his skin," quoth Clyburn. Not the economy, an unwanted war or a politician who acts like a social butterfly while his constituents shovel spam from jars and dine on government cheese. It's the color of his skin.

But does anyone seriously think that if Obama had brained himself with a golf club early in his term, that Biden wouldn't be equally besieged by angry voters and the political opposition? And unless Biden successfully pulled a Clinton, and claimed to be America's third black president, he would have had to do it all without the benefit of a race card.

We have discovered that just about anything you can say about Obama, besides 'Messiah' is some sort of racist code word. Two years it was revealed that calling him a socialist is racist. This week we learned that calling him European is also a slur. Calling him a 'European Socialist' might just qualify as a hate crime.

This isn't really about racism. If it were, much more overtly racist comments made in private by top Democrats like Harry 'light-skinned with no negro dialect' Reid or Bill 'Obama would be getting us coffee' Clinton, would have lasted for more than a 5 minute news cycle of outrage. It's about the political uses of race. The bigotry farming that makes racism into a constant part of the political landscape.

To Democrats, racism isn't a problem. It's a solution. Their speeches about looking forward to the end of racism, are as genuine as oil executives talking about the day when we get all our energy from the sun. Sure it sounds good in theory, but it would also put them out of business. One day we'll all join hands and sing about brotherhood. But today we've got to go on MSNBC and explain how objecting to higher taxes is coded racism.

The Democrats have played both sides of the racial divide going on a century and a half. They have been the Klansmen and the civil rights activists. The bully club boys and the reformers. If you can think of a position on race, you can find a Democrat hiding behind it. In politics they call that 'divide and conquer'. And from segregation to desegregation, that has been their game. Create and exploit divisions. Then promise to heal them.

The civil rights legacy of the Democratic party is one of pandering to white and black racists. From George Wallace to Al Sharpton, the Democratic party has played host to racists of both colors. And Asa Earl Carter who penned Wallace's 'Segregation Forever' lines, also wrote Oprah's favorite book about a little Indian boy suffering from discrimination. Over the course of two decades, the party reinvented itself along with George Wallace as the 'anti-racists'.  But this was a change in orientation, not in ideology.

Depression era economic malaise had served the big government agenda under FDR. But economic boom times forced the party to shift their narrative from the economy to race. Eisenhower showed that the Republicans couldn't be beaten on the old economic social justice line anymore. But healing racial conflict was another matter.

The Democratic party had no more interest in repairing the racial divide, than they had in repairing the economy. What they wanted was an issue that would allow them to broaden government control over the states and lock in a voting base in a state of perpetual poverty. And so they began the transition from poverty hucksters to racial hucksters. Just as today the party is moving from racial hucksterism to environmental hucksterism. Forget the first black president and stay tuned for the rise of the very first green president.

The successful capitalization of race has created fortunes, but not for those most affected by it. It deepened racial tensions, as it was designed to do. At no juncture did the Democratic party really try to make things better. What they did best was pose and preen against the backdrop of suffering. That is still what they do today. The entire industry of declaring things racist, that occasionally shows up on MSNBC is the perpetuation of George Wallace's old segregationism under new colors.

The unreason of it isn't limited to the United States. In England, Camden decided to rename Selous Street after Nelson Mandela. Why Selous Street? Because there was a Fredrick Selous, who was an African explorer and colonialist, even if Selous Street wasn't actually named after him, but the painter Henry Courtney Selous. The painter Selous had to have his name purged, because it was the same as that of another man entirely, to make way for a politically correct terrorist.

Like Cinna the Poet, in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, the politically correct mob cries, what matter if he's Selous the Colonialist or Selous the Painter. It is no matter, his name is Selous. Tear him apart for his paintings, if not his colonialism. The dialogue on Obama is equally irrational. Distant connections are made with the one aim of proving that his critics are racists. Birthers have nothing on Racers, who can turn anything from Socialist to European into racial invective.

Was it racist when Gingrich called Obama the "food stamp president". The discussion itself is a tangent, because regardless of what you think of Gingrich or Obama-- 47 million Americans are still on food stamps. The Newspeak of political correctness obsessively parses language, while ignoring consequences. It would rather rename streets, than take on the poverty and social dysfunction living on them. It pretends to be concerned about racism, when it is only concerned about the political exploitation of race.

No sooner does a Republican candidate rise up, then the media rings the race bell. Even if it's as pathetic as accusing Romney of slurring Obama by calling him a European. An obvious reference to the nation's long history of anti-European racism. But while the bell keeps ringing, the dogs have stopped salivating. The stimulus reflex has been broken and cries of racism only lead to yawns. That is the final tragic legacy of the Democratic party's exploitation of racism. Their exploitation has killed any interest in actual racism. They have spent so much time crying wolf, that no one pays attention anymore.

America's racial problems have always been economic at heart, whether it was plantation owners realizing that African slaves they never had to set free were a better deal than indentured Irish servants , or the net effect of black migration to northern cities in search of jobs that vanished when the soldiers began coming home, or the present day segregated government subsidized economy that provides selective opportunities to minorities while cutting them off from the larger marketplace. The rise of Mexican illegal immigration and its impact on both whites and blacks is part of that same economic narrative.

The Democratic party used race to build socialism. Rather than aiming for a post-racial society, they exploited segregation and deepened racial tensions, to implement their long term agenda. That agenda is passing through one final phase. The race card is being played out. And when that's done, the party will turn its focus elsewhere. And black people will once again be left behind by a party that no longer has any use for them.

From NY to Jerusalem,

Daniel Greenfield

Covers the Stories

Behind the News

Chag Sameach! Holiday of the Torah Begins Tuesday Night

by Hillel Fendel

Follow Israel news on  and .

The Jewish holiday of Shavuot is set to begin Tuesday night – lasting for its one Biblical day (from sunset to the next sunset) in Israel, and two days in the rest of the world. Israel National News is closed from Tuesday afternoon Israel time for the holiday and wishes you a Chag Sameach--happy holiday!

Shavuot (Pentecost, Feast of Weeks), as well as Pesach (Passover) and Sukkot (Tabernacles), are the three pilgrimage festivals on which Jews are bidden to visit Jerusalem. Tens of thousands of people are in fact expected to arrive at the Western Wall throughout Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, though the Biblical commandment to visit Jerusalem on these days applies fully only when the Holy Temple is built.

The current custom of gathering at the Wall for the holiday began spontaneously on the Shavuot holiday of 1967 (5727), which followed the Six Day War and the liberation of Jerusalem by only a few days. Realizing that masses of people would descend upon the Wall and its narrow walkway, the authorities razed the old buildings within 100 meters from the Wall in order to make room. It was the first holiday in 1,900 years in which throngs of Jews congregated at the Western Wall.

http://www.virtualjerusalem.com/livekotel/newkotelcam/virtualjerusalem/index.php?affid=18

The holiday of Shavuot marks the Jewish People's receiving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai 3,323 years ago. It also marks the day after the 49-day Sefirat HaOmer counting period, which begins on the Passover holiday. The counting denotes the fact that the ultimate purpose of the Exodus from Egypt was for the Jewish People to receive the Torah and begin its national/spiritual existence as the People of the Book.

Features of the joyous Shavuot holiday include:
* remaining awake all night to study Torah; known as Tikkun Leil Shavuot.
* the bringing of the Bikurim (First Fruits) to the Holy Temple (temporarily suspended, until the Temple is rebuilt); greenery is placed arund the home and synagogue to recall this.
* the time of the wheat harvest;
* the public reading of the Book of Ruth for several reasons, among them: Ruth accepted Judaism as the Jews did on the holiday, the story takes place during the Shavuot season, and King David, her descendant, died on Shavuot.

* a wide-spread custom of eating dairy foods on Shavuot, as the Torah is compared to "milk and honey under the tongue". (for more reasons, see our Shavuot dairy recipe)

In Israel, Shavuot is a legal holiday. There is no public transportation; schools, offices and most stores are closed; newspapers are not published. 

(IsraelNationalNews.com)

Shavuot

The UN: Stranger than Fiction - by Giulio Meotti

MONDAY, JUNE 6, 2011

MIDDLE EAST AND TERRORISM

by Giulio Meotti

The Canadian columnist Mark Steyn writes that “if you take a quart of ice-cream and a quart of dog feces and mix ‘em together the result will taste more like the latter than the former. That’s the problem with the UN”.

This distasteful image is easily explained. In 2004, 13 states out of a total of 53 of the failed UN Commission on Human Rights were “not free” or “partly free”, according to Freedom House. Today these nasty states are 21 in the "renewed" UN Human Rights Council.

On the other hand, in September, it could be possible that the State of Israel will be declared an illegal occupier of Judea and Samaria.

If the UN management of former Secretary General Kofi Annan was marked by corruption, nepotism and political irresponsibility, the leadership of Ban Ki-moon is perhaps even worse.

Several weeks ago, the U.S. Congress cut 400 million dollars from its annual contribution to the UN.  (Finally - way to go, Congress!  It's a start!)

Oh, yes, about corruption, Ban Ki-moon has been indicted by senior officials of his own organization. Inga-Britt Ahlenius, a former head of the fight against corruption at the UN, wrote in a memo that the management by the UN Secretary General is “reprehensible” and his actions are “unprecedented”.

An Italian apparatchik, Francesco Bastagli, wrote for the magazine The New Republic an essay entitled “Justice Undone”. Bastagli was the African envoy for Kofi Annan: “After I resigned, I watched as the new Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has taken a more political opportunist” stand than his predecessor".

In addition to dictatorships and corruption, the UN seems united mainly by nepotism. The son of former Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Kojo, was on the payroll of the company that was supposed to check the correct functioning of the Oil for Food program (the most devastating scandal in the history of the United Nations).

The new secretary’s daughter, Hyun Hee Ban, is working for Unicef, the UN agency for children. The son-in-law of the secretary, Siddarth Chatterjee, had been appointed head of UN staff in Baghdad, one of the most important roles for the United Nations. After that job, Siddarth went to leading an agency in Denmark, which manages billions. Immediately, Unicef moved his wife, the daughter of Ban Ki-moon…to Denmark.

The management of Ban Ki-moon has also been characterized by one of the worst chapters in the history of the United Nations, that of sexual violence. Three years ago, one hundred Sri Lankan “peacekeepers” were accused of abusing Haitian children. Abuses were committed by Moroccan troops in the Ivory Coast and by Indian troops in Congo.

Sex scandals involving UN peacekeepers took place in Bosnia, Kosovo, Cambodia, East Timor, Burundi and Western Africa. In Africa the locals now speak of the “peacekeeper babies”, the illegitimate children of UN soldiers.

The mission in Congo was the second largest UN peacekeeping mission. Rape, pedophilia and prostitution are the accusations against the UN. The minors were lured by a dollar. These girls are known as “one dollar baby”.

In the past, with all the regimes that do not respect human rights, it was the United States that was excluded from the Human Rights Commission (2002). It was accepted that Libya assumed the presidency (2003), that Sudan was a member (2004) and Saudi Arabia, Cuba and Zimbabwe decided on the human rights violations (2005). While the Western coalition was embarking in the Libyan war under the aegis of the UN, at the United Nations, the expert on mercenaries was Mrs. Najat Hajjaji, the Libyan apparatchik of Colonel Qaddafi, who is making great use of mercenaries in the Libyan war.

Under the wise leadership of Ban Ki-moon, the regime of Sudan, that in Darfur has used hunger as a weapon of mass murder of Christians and animists, became vice president of the World Food Program and joined the Executive Board of the Agency for Refugees.

It also happened that China, Kazakhstan, Libya and Iran, with their controlled media, topped the Commission on information.

The biggest shareholder of the UN is Iran, which under the management of Ban Ki-moon has brilliantly used the United Nations agencies to circumvent any diplomatic isolation. The United Nations has awarded Tehran the title “global capital for philosophy”, and Iran actually is littered with philosophers and thinkers imprisoned or forced into exile.

Tehran has just become part of the Committee on the status of women, although the Iranian regime is one of the most segregationist in the world towards the female sex. There is an Iranian on the Fund for Population Activities and the Development Fund for Women. (File this one under Ripley's Believe it or Not!)

Although there is evidence of chemical weapons trafficking from Iran to Hizbullah, Tehran throughout 2011 will be vice president of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.

Tehran is also on the Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice: pretty good for a country that is a world leader in executions.

Iran has joined the executive board of Unicef, despite the fact that Tehran holds the record for hangings of minors. Iran is in the Commission for Science, Technology and Development and the Committee for the “peaceful use of space”. Iran sits also in the Agency for Refugees, the Environment Programme and Programme for Human Settlements.

To understand the UN's degradation one has to see the awards. One bears the name of the President of Equatorial Guinea, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, who promoted a UN fund named in his honor and dedicated to science. The UN philanthropist is known as “the worst dictator in Africa, worse than Mugabe”.

The United Nations Public Service Award of 2010 has been assigned to the Lebanese Interior Ministry, a bastion of power of the pro-Iranian militia Hizbullah.

Under the mandate of Ban Ki-moon, Durban has become the omen of the worst ideological bias of the UN. In September, near the tenth anniversary of the massacre of 11 September, Ban Ki-moon will host “Durban III”, the remake of the festival of Jew-hatred celebrated in South Africa in 2001. Those were the days just before the attack on the Twin Towers. Never was a hate scenario better laid. Durban was the premise to Ground Zero.

Jews wearing kippahs had to protect themselves against the demonstrators touting portraits of Bin Laden and hounding the Jews. The Jewish centers in the city were stormed and closed and the press conference of the Israeli delegation was violently assaulted and interrupted. Israel was compared to Nazism and accused of apartheid in order to claim, particularly as in South Africa, its lack of legitimacy.

The greatest indictment of the UN against Israel is demolished by an incredible recanting of his own author. This is Richard Goldstone, the South African judge who has just reneged his own diabolical report on the war in Gaza.

The resolution “Combating Defamation of Religions”, approved by the UN, is the most lethal instrument of suppression of freedom of expression and the greatest achievement of the Organization of Islamic Conference, that under Ban Ki-moon became the most powerful bloc of voters in the global forum.

But there is more. The greatest blemish of Ban Ki-moon’s leadership remains Darfur, the scene of the worst massive massacre since Rwanda. Not only the UN has been unable to call it “genocide”, but Ban Ki-moon. on June 16, 2007, gave this memorable explanation of the 400,000 deaths by the hordes of Arab guerrillas who have destroyed villages, wells, plantations, farms and butchered families, raped women, abused children and girls to sell them as slaves: “The conflict in Darfur is part of global warming”, he pronounced.

Herein lies the summary of the tragedy named United Nations: explaining the mass graves as the advance of the desert.

Source: http://bit.ly/iYGwUz

Giulio Meotti
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors. 

Why the U.S. probably won't recognize Libya's rebel government

FOREIGN POLICY

Posted By Joshua Keating  Monday, June 6, 2011 - 11:40 AM

No offense to Vanuatu or Abkhazia, but there's a slightly more high-profile international-recognition dispute taking place right now, as Paul Richter reports:

Ali Aujali, the soft-spoken representative from the rebels' ruling body, the Transitional National Council, has spent three months in a forlorn effort to persuade the Obamaadministration to extend diplomatic recognition to his group, a move that would bolster its international standing and could provide access to $34 billion in frozen Libyan assets.

But the White House has shut the door on formal recognition, imperiling the interim council's ability to pay for its rebellion as well as Aujali's capacity to keep the lights on in his lonely mission.

The military stalemate in Libya has turned Aujali, who served as Kadafi's envoy in Washington before switching sides in February, into a Rodney Dangerfield of diplomats. He waters his front lawn, worries about storm damage to his roof, and takes walks with his grandchildren when he's not escorting visiting rebels to inconclusive meetings at the White House and on Capitol Hill.

His hopes have been raised time and again, only to be dashed. When he asks American officials why the Obama administration won't recognize the opposition council even though the U.S. insists Kadafi step down and is supporting the NATO alliance that is bombing Kadafi's military, diplomacy kicks in.

"I am only told, 'It is a legal issue,' and no more," sighs Aujali, a compact man in his early 60s with a shaved head and a close-cropped goatee. "We are desperate."

Administration officials tell Richter that the council "may not control enough territory or population to qualify as sovereign," but more to the point, transfering recognition from an established government, no matter how despotic, to a rebel group goes against long-standing U.S. policy. I looked into this a bit for an Explainer piece following last year's uprising in Kyrgyzstan:

 When the United States was founded, it established diplomatic relations with various foreign governments in an ad hoc fashion, and even today there are few codified rules concerning recognition. Generally speaking, it is the policy of the U.S. government to recognize states, not governments, and to deal (or choose not to deal) with whoever happens to be in charge. This hasn't always been the case: Woodrow Wilson used nonrecognition, with some success, to delegitimize nondemocratic foreign leaders like Mexican dictator Victoriano Huerta, and for years, the United States recognized the anti-communist government in Taipei as the legitimate government of China. In recent decades, however, U.S. leaders have mostly tried to avoid getting involved in recognition battles in which they would be lobbied by competing factions seeking legitimacy.

Of course, this can become more complicated when there are multiple leaders or groups within a country claiming to be the legitimate government. The United States typically avoids taking the lead in recognition, waiting for the domestic politics to play out or for regional bodies like the Organization of American States to resolve the crisis before deciding whether to confer legitimacy on the new government. In the case of Honduras, for instance, the United States followed the lead of other Latin American countries in deeming Zelaya's ouster illegitimate.

Italy, France, Qatar, and Kuwait have recognized the rebels as the legitimate government of Libya, and some other countries have taken intermediate steps in that direction. Sen. John McCain has called for the Obama administration to add the U.S. to that list. But it's safe to say that we're still a long way off from an international, or even regional, consensus recognizing the Transitional National Council as the legitimate government of Libya, so the U.S. is unlikely to stick its neck out at this stage.

This issue may also come up in Yemen if the current leadership vacuum continues.

Paying for Peace Can we just buy security in Afghanistan?

FOREIGN POLICY

BY CHARLES KENNY | JUNE 6, 2011

In Afghanistan, as in Iraq, both the U.S. Defense Department and Agency for International Development (USAID) are struggling to find ways to use aid resources to promote the goals of development and security. The effort involves a considerable amount of money: If Afghanistan's volatile Helmand province were a country, it alone would have been the fifth-largest recipient of USAID funding in 2008. Meanwhile, aid organizations and NGOs complain that military programs such as the $1 billion Commander's Emergency Response Program build infrastructure that will not be maintained and will provide little long-term development impact. The military, for its part, complains that civilian development efforts are too focused on secure areas at the expense of winning hearts and minds in other places where it would actually make a difference to reduce violence.

Both sides are probably at least half-right: Despite many successesin improving Afghan citizens' quality of life, it seems quite likely that aid flows are failing to deliver economic development or security. A recent review of reconstruction in Helmand province by Stuart Gordon of the London-based Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) concluded that aid "may have as many negative, unintended effects as positive ones and, at the very least, is not a panacea." Gordon's interviews with people in Helmand suggested a widespread feeling that aid was only entrenching local tribal and criminal elites while doing little to improve the lives of ordinary people. But perhaps there is a way to meet both security and development goals at once. Just giving money to poor people turns out to be a powerful tool to improve lives and foster opportunity. And making that money conditional on security could provide a big incentive for local communities to turn against the Taliban.

The latest rage in the development industry is paying people to develop: to go to school, to get kids vaccinated, and so on. Conditional cash transfers hand over money to families if -- and only if -- they ensure junior is in school or has his shots. Mexico's conditional cash program, Oportunidades, reaches more than 25 million people; Brazil's Bolsa Familia reaches 12 million households. The programs work and have dramatic impacts. Not only have they considerably increased vaccination and enrollment rates -- Mexico's program increases the chance that children will complete grade nine by 23 percent -- but the money also has a number of other positive effects in areas like nutrition and income generation.

Growing evidence suggests that even unconditional cash transfers to poor people -- just giving them money, no strings attached -- can have a big development payoff as well. A pilot of a universal grant program in the Otjivero-Omitara area of Namibia found that within a year of program launch, child malnutrition fell from 42 to 10 percent, the proportion of adults involved in income-generating activities increased from 44 to 55 percent, school attendance rose considerably, savings expanded, and crime rates fell.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, we are struggling to spend considerable resources in a manner that achieves peace and development. Why not use cash transfers to promote stability? Here's one way it might work: In districts that are free from violence against Afghan forces or NATO's International Security Assistance Force, every adult is paid $20 every other month, with no conditions at all. If violence resumes, payments drop by a widely advertised amount. Too much violence, no cash transfer. If the Taliban or related groups keep fighting or attempt to extort payments, then a whole district population has a strong personal incentive to snitch. And to incentivize the security of those involved in the payments system, deaths of payment agents would also lead to a reduction or curtailment of payments at the district level.  .... read more