Soon It Will Be Foreign Policy Time!

Sent by a fellow memo reader and friend who e mailed: "Time again for the annual 'Stella Awards'!" (See 1 below.)

Victor Davis Hanson discusses an Obamaplosion! (See 2 below.)

Baum believes Congress misreads public angst over Wall Street.

Certainly Wall Street seems unimpressed with Congress, Geithner and Obama's proposed stimulus solutions if the market's reaction means anything. (See 3 below.)

Stimulus wins, unity loses after an initial try at it according to Peter Baker. (See 4 below.)

Additional comments about Obama's press conference. (See 5 below.)

Bob Herbert, on the other hand, thinks Obama is a chess master and writes; crowds remain willing to eat up what Obama says with gusto. He also believes Obama is light years ahead of protagonists in his thinking and thus the chess master comparison (See 6 below.)

U.S. oil discovery. (See 7 below.)

A brilliant explanation of why Israel's future is so challenged. The world is always discomforted by those who are strong and who refuse to go quietly to their death. (See 8 below.)

A repeat of what I posted many months ago but worth posting again. (See 9 below.)

Obama will get his stimulus bill pretty much as he wants because he has the votes. When the economy recovers he will get credit, regardless of what action Congress takes because the needs of 300 plus million people will eventually turn the economy. The consequences of the stimulus bill could produce inflation which would then have to be dealt with and that could hurt him. Also, the overburden of more and more debt could also tend to restrain any recovery.

Meanwhile, the ensuing months will be taken up with how Obama addresses the many foreign birds that are circling and soon to roost.

Livni proves to be an Israeli Feedlebom like the old Spike Jones record. Israel's political structure continues to insure weak coalition governance and infighting (See 10 below.)



Dick


1)For those unfamiliar with these awards, they are named after 79-year-old Stella Liebeck who spilled hot coffee on herself and successfully sued the McDonald's in New Mexico where she purchased the coffee. You remember, she took the lid off the coffee and put it between her knees while she was driving. Who would ever think one could get burned doing that, right?

That's right; these are awards for the most outlandish lawsuits and verdicts in the U.S. You know, the kinds of cases that make you scratch your head. So keep your head-scratcher handy.

Here are the Stella's for the past year:

7 TH PLACE :

Kathleen Robertson of Austin , Texas was awarded $80,000 by a jury of her peers after breaking her ankle tripping over a toddler who was running inside a furniture store. The store owners were understandably surprised by the verdict, considering the running toddler was her own son.

6TH PLACE :

Carl Truman, 19, of Los Angeles , California won $74,000 plus medical expenses when his neighbor ran over his hand with a Honda Accord. Truman apparently didn't notice there was someone at the wheel of the car when he was trying to steal his neighbor's hubcaps.

Go ahead, grab your head scratcher.

5TH PLACE :

Terrence Dickson, of Bristol , Pennsylvania , was leaving a house he had just burglarized by way of the garage. Unfortunately for Dickson, the automatic garage door opener malfunctioned and he could not get the garage door to open. Worse, he couldn't re-enter the house because the door connecting the garage to the house locked when Dickson pulled it shut. Forced to sit for eight, count 'em, EIGHT , days on a case of Pepsi and a large bag of dry dog food, he sued the homeowner's insurance company claiming undue mental anguish. Amazingly, the jury said the insurance company must pay Dickson $500,000 for his anguish. We should all have this kind of anguish.

Keep scratching. There are more...

4TH PLACE

Jerry Williams, of Little Rock , Arkansas , garnered 4th Place in the Stella's when he was awarded $14,500 plus medical expenses after being bitten on the butt by his next door neighbor's beagle - even though the beagle was on a chain in its owner's fenced yard. Williams did not get as much as he asked for because the jury believed the beagle might have been provoked at the time of the butt bite because Williams had climbed over the fence into the yard and repeatedly shot the dog with a pellet gun.


Grrrrr.!!!!! Scratch, scratch.

3RD PLACE:

Amber Carson of Lancaster, Pennsylvania because a jury ordered a Philadelphia restaurant to pay her $113,500 after she slipped on a spilled soft drink and broke her tailbone. The reason the soft drink was on the floor - Ms. Carson had thrown it at her boyfriend 30 seconds earlier during an argument. Whatever happened to people being responsible for their own actions?

Scratch, scratch, scratch.
Hang in there; there are only two more Stella's to go...

2ND PLACE :

Kara Walton, of Claymont , Delaware sued the owner of a night club in a nearby city because she fell from the bathroom window to the floor, knocking out her two front teeth. Even though Ms. Walton was trying to sneak through the ladies room window to avoid paying the $3.50 cover charge, the jury said the night club had to pay her $12,000 -- oh, yeah, plus dental expenses. Go figure.

1ST PLACE :

This year's runaway First Place Stella Award winner was Mrs. Merv Grazinski, of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, who purchased a new 32-foot Winnebago motor home.

On her first trip home, from an OU football game, having driven on to the freeway, she set the cruise control at 70 mph and calmly left the driver's seat to go to the back of the Winnebago to make herself a sandwich.

Not surprisingly, the motor home left the freeway, crashed and overturned. Also not surprisingly, Mrs. Grazinski sued Winnebago for not putting in the owner's manual that she couldn't actually leave the driver's seat while the cruise control was set. The Oklahoma jury awarded her, are you sitting down, $1,750,000 PLUS a new motor home. Winnebago actually changed their manuals as a result of this suit, just in case Mrs. Grazinski has any relatives who might also buy a motor home.

2) Hope He Can Change
By Victor Davis Hanson


An Obamaplosion

I get loads of quasi-hate mail about questioning Obama’s candidacy and governance. But I am worried, not about Obama, or the politics of governance, but about the nation itself. The media has forsaken us. But after only two weeks we are in a crisis stage of confidence, and the story is spiraling by the hour out of control. I write here not to score points, but to warn readers that this is all very serious. Obama is our President, and we must hope he does something fast to save his administration from general ridicule that will incur real dangers for all of us abroad.

Again, anyone who cares about the U.S., at home and overseas, must be worried, very worried, about the disastrous last two weeks. Even the fawning media — that is responsible in some way for the crisis, given that they chose to be Pravda-like in encouraging the messianic style that got a haughty Obama in his present mess — will soon start bailing in efforts to restore their last fides. If a Dick Morris figure does not come to the rescue soon, Obama’s soaring rhetoric of hope and change will become the stuff of Leno/Letterman and general laughter. Bush was unfairly demonized, but no one abroad thought he was predictably soft and would be so-so about protecting U.S. interests, or that his words and his deeds would be so often in direct antithesis.

What happened? Count the ways, and then let us see what might be done pronto!

I. Obama claimed a new moral high ground, and the media seconded that. But nothing in his career — his failed congressional race, the divorce disclosures of his two Senate primary and general rivals, Rezko, Wright, Blago advisor, Ayers, etc. — had ever suggested he had on a single occasion challenged prevailing norms in efforts to raise the ethical bar.

Instead he was allowed to blather on about heaven on earth, while he was by needs governing from the corrupt cesspool of DC lawyers and lobbyists. So we got the worst of both worlds: the most exalted ethical rhetoric ever, and the greatest ethical lapses of any incipient administration in memory. Over 10 lobbyists now appointed. Consider further: Richardson (nuff said), Holder (helped to pardon a most wanted fugitive), Lynn (Raytheon lobbyist now at Defense), Killefer (sloppy taxes; she’s gone), Geithner (tax dodger), Daschle (would have been a tax felon had he been one of us), Rangel (blank check both to write and break our tax laws), Dodd and Frank (exemptions for ethical lapses at the eye of the financial storm).

There are still the Blago tapes and the fears that Prosecutor Fitzgerald short-circuited the investigation in recognition that once Team Obama started turning up horse-trading on tape they had to be warned to desist. The full release of those transcripts will either confirm or belie that fear—and Blago is sinisterly brilliant and eager for revenge.

II. Then there were the inflated lectures on historic foreign policy to be made by the clumsy political novice who trashed his own country and his predecessor in the most ungracious manner overseas to a censured Saudi-run press organ (e.g., Bush is dictatorial, the Saudi king is courageous; Obama can mend bridges that America broke to aggrieved Muslims [apparently Teheran hostages, Rushdie, serial attacks in the 1990s, 9/11, Madrid, London never apparently occurred, and neither did feeding Somalis, saving Kuwait, protesting Chechnya, Bosnia/Kosovo, billions to Egypt, Jordan, the Palestinians, help in two Afghan wars, and on and on]). It is always dangerous to suggest that ‘America then bad, America now good’ — the former gives bad guys talking points, the latter reason to try something stupid.

III. Then there was the shrill, harsh campaign rhetoric of Bush shredding the Constitution — FISA, Guantanamo, Patriot Act, Iraq, renditions — followed by ‘all that for now staying the same’, inasmuch as we haven’t been attacked in over seven years. This suggests either that Obama was disingenuous then or disingenuous now. Let us hope it was the former.

IV. The stimulus is an ungodly disaster — a trillion dollars to foster Democratic constituencies that will leave a generation to come with unsustainable debt. Listening to Reid/Pelosi has proven catastrophic. Necessary loan guarantees to stop meltdowns have morphed into a liberal wish list (cf. Emanuel’s ‘don’t let a crisis go to waste’) of a half century. Borrowing trillions to cure an economy that borrowed hundreds of billions and got itself into an abyss of debt makes no sense.

V. Robert Gibbs, the new press secretary is, well, incompetent. He is a Scott McClellan nightmare that won’t go away — given his long McClellan-like relationship with the President (McClellan should have been fired on hour one on the job). When Davis now sorta blames Fox News for Obama’s calamities he is McClellan to the core. He is sounding as duplicitous, vague, and contradictory as Obama is supposedly transparent and bipartisan. The conflicting messages don’t mix. I think he is kind and a good person in a way McClellan was not (though not always so in the primaries), but Gibbs is not helping the President and absolutely exposing the press to ridicule, who otherwise would have ripped apart someone of his caliber long ago.

VI. True, Biden is just being Biden. But now he is Vice President Biden of our United States. Already, he’s ridiculed the Chief Justice. He has trashed the former VP. He has bragged on himself ad nauseam in very Bidenesque weird ways (best qualified VP in history he booms), and it has only been two weeks. He is as incompetent in foreign affairs as Gates, Jones, Holbrooke are skilled.

And the result of all this?

At home our President is losing critical credibility — but at a geometrical rate in week 2 of a four-year term. He must for our sake improve — fast!

Abroad, some really creepy people are now lining up to test Obama’s world view of ‘Bush did it/but I am the world’: the North Koreans are readying their missiles; the Iranians are calling us passive, bragging on nukes and satellites; Russia is declaring missile defense is over and the vulnerable Euros in real need of iffy Russian gas; Pakistanis say no more drone attacks (and then our friends the Indians say “shut up” about Kashmir and the Euros order no more ‘buy American” and no to more troops in Afghanistan). Oddly, Iraq stays quiet, our homeland security measures are keeping us safe, and the initial bank guarantees stopped a greater meltdown — so not everything was ruined on January 20.

Some suggestions

I. Drop all the talk about the best, the most, the greatest ethical, moral, legal etc. Just keep quiet and call in Senate leaders of both parties and show them the names of nominees and ask for pre-hearing advice. I think Geithner cannot now stay: not when Obama confesses that Daschle had to go to avoid two tax laws for elites and mass. But Geithner’s sin was far worse, since he was the nominal head of the IRS itself. He should step down, and Obama should likewise distance himself from Rangel. Advice: Keep quiet and carry a big ethical stick.

II. Never trash your predecessor or the U.S. abroad. Defend it — always; America is better than the alternative; that it is not perfect does not mean that it is not great. Bush’s decision to surge was courageous; a Saudi royal calling for Israel to go back to the 1948 borders is just more of the same. Trust Billary, Gates, and Jones on foreign policy; ignore Biden. Send him to funerals (and that is risky).

III. Hush about the Bush homeland security measures. Just accept them as necessary evils. Express regret for the no-win choices, but insist that another 4 years of safety from 9/11 attacks is the primary consideration (and we will assume that ‘Bush shredded the Constitution’ was mere empty-headed Hollywood-imported campaign rhetoric.)

IV. Halve the stimulus. Insist on tax cuts rather than hand-outs. Include mandatory spending caps to come based on GDP performance; call for national unity to balance the budget when the storms pass. Do not listen to one word from Pelosi/Reid. The former is an extremist, the latter unhinged. Call in Lieberman for insider advice. Find some Senate Democratic moderates. We will endure this 1981-2-like Recession that is not the Great Depression, but increasingly an excuse for European socialism that has now imploded from Greece to the U.K.

V. Replace Gibbs. Perhaps bump him upstairs to some sort of communications czar. But don’t unleash him on the public or press. Bring some old Democratic pro out from the past, either a liberal version of a TV vet like Tony Snow or some Clinton-era flak.

VI. Give Biden a key assignment: something like an Al Gore reforming government thing — anything other than commentary on foreign policy or ad hoc philosophizing. In thirty days Dick Cheney will be Rushmorean in comparison.

Let us hope that the world doesn’t try to test us this month. And if the outlaws do, let the sober and judicious people (and there are many) in Obama’s foreign policy team be allowed to react. In week three, we are light years from ‘hope and change’; now it is let us “hope he can change.”

Basic message: stop, halt, quit NOW the “I am the messiah” rhetoric before the fair-weather media bails.

So stop “Bush did it” refrains. And stop the trash Rush/Hannity/talk radio/Fox. Arguing with talk radio is not what Presidents do (did Bush diss Keith Olbermann?). Speak softly and kindly (and HUMBLY) in preparing for mega challenges against American interests. Do all that and the American people will rally to our President. They want their President to succeed and can forgive a lot, but again not hypocrisy cum self-righteousness.

Ask President Carter.

3) Congress Misreads Public Anger at Wall Street:
By Caroline Baum

There’s only one thing more revolting than watching Wall Street abuse taxpayer dollars: watching Congress bloviate about it.

Our elected representatives are gleeful at the opportunity to fan public outrage at bankers for their excesses -- in part because it deflects attention from their own.

Whether it’s Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, calling bankers a “bunch of idiots,” or Rhode Island Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse proposing an “oversight court” to restrain Wall Street’s “massive self-indulgences,” Congress is perched on its high horse.

Public anger at Wall Street is both palpable and understandable. It’s also well-deserved.

Yet it would be a mistake for Congress to interpret that anger as a condemnation of capitalism and an endorsement of bigger government. If my e-mail is a reflection of popular sentiment, Americans are angry at Wall Street for gambling with other people’s money (and losing). They are angry at having to pay for the extravagances of others while they lived within their means. And they are angry at a system that privatizes profits and socializes risks.

They like President Barack Obama and want him to succeed. They want increased regulation of the financial sector, especially since they’re on the hook for past mistakes.

That said, the public doesn’t want government calling the shots. They understand -- at least they should -- that prices are a better way of allocating the economy’s scarce resources than government diktat. (If government was good at it, the Soviet Union would be flourishing.)

Public Choices

Government is nothing more than a collection of individuals acting in their own -- yes, their own -- self-interest, in much the same way that Wall Street does. The only difference, according to advocates of public choice theory, is that governments make public, not private, choices: They choose for us, in other words.

And we aren’t free to reject those choices. Whereas transactions in the private sector are voluntary, the government coerces us (threat of imprisonment) to pay for goods and services via taxes.

Politicians don’t earn a profit in the strict business sense for the services they deliver. Instead they monetize their connections, if not while they’re in Congress -- passing laws that benefit favored constituencies in exchange for campaign contributions -- then after they leave (see Daschle, Tom).

It is not my intention to exonerate Wall Street for its role in sinking the financial system. Nor do I wish to excuse the behavior of banks on the dole.

Bad Taste

Wall Street has always had a deaf ear when it comes to what passes for acceptable behavior. In bad times, the deafness is even more glaring. Client retreats at high-end resorts, million- dollar office renovations, corporate jets shuttling board members across the country: Even before these activities were a matter of public interest (and taxpayer dollars), they were a manifestation of bad taste.

Still there’s something disconcerting, even comical, about politicians trying to cap compensation while “making a bunch of people feel better by beating up on rich people,” says Jim Bianco, president of Bianco Research in Chicago. “There’s a mechanism for correcting the excesses. It’s called the stock price and the board of directors.”

If you want to punish Wall Street, Bianco says, that’s how to do it. Under normal circumstances, when stock prices get too low relative to companies’ expected earnings, investors step in to buy.

Wanted: Private Capital

Not now, Bianco says. “Private money will come back when it knows it can have a say in running a company,” not when there’s a good chance the government will swoop in and take it over.

Here’s where government’s best intentions to make things better have made them worse.

“A necessary condition to attract private capital back is a consistent and predictable strategy by the government,” writes Luigi Zingales, professor of entrepreneurship and finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, in a commentary for the Center for Economic Policy Research. “Without it any other effort is in vain.”

The title of Zingales’s 2003 book, “Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists,” co-authored with Chicago Booth economist Raghuram Rajan, seems applicable to the current situation.

“The weakness of the capitalist system is not that it doesn’t work economically but that it’s hard to sustain politically,” Zingales says.

With ordinary Americans losing their jobs and elite bankers begging for help, political intervention is a given, he says. In spite of good intentions, it may end up impeding the functioning of the market.

Guarantee of Nothing

OK, so capitalists screwed up, to borrow a phrase from the new president. So did homebuyers who thought there was a free lunch. And mortgage lenders who were slinging the hash.

That’s not a reason to implicate the entire system, unless you think the government can do it better.

“The capitalist system stumbled and fell,” Bianco says. “It’s just like teenagers, who do stupid things. Sometimes the solution isn’t putting restrictions on them but letting them pull themselves up.”

How’s this for a twist? For the market to begin to function normally, investors need a guarantee that the government won’t do anything, not a promise that it will.

4) Obama Sternly Takes On His Critics
By Peter Baker

President Obama has made a show of reaching across the aisle since taking office, inviting three Republicans into his cabinet and wining and dining other opposition leaders. But by Monday, he sounded like a candidate back on the trail, railing against the status quo and dismissing critics as apostles of a failed philosophy.


Three weeks into his tenure, Mr. Obama acknowledged that his effort to change the political climate in Washington had yielded little. He made clear that he had all but given up hope of securing a bipartisan consensus behind his $800 billion economic recovery package, arguing that the urgency of the economic crisis had at least for now outweighed the need for unity.

“I’m happy to get good ideas from across the political spectrum, from Democrats and Republicans,” he said at the Monday night news conference. “What I won’t do is return to the failed theories of the last eight years that got us into this fix in the first place, because those theories have been tested and they have failed. And that’s part of what the election in November was all about.”

The sharp tone at the news conference and at a whooping election-style rally in Indiana earlier in the day signaled a shift by the White House in the fractious debate over his package of spending and tax breaks.

With no Republicans in the House voting for the economic plan and just three in the Senate, Mr. Obama on Monday began a week of barnstorming stops that will also take him to Florida and Illinois to create momentum behind his program.

Gone were the soothing notes of the last three weeks. Authoritative and unsmiling, gloomy rather than inspirational, Mr. Obama cast the nation’s economy in dire light and offered a barbed point-by-point critique of the Republican argument that his plan would just create more government jobs and authorize a raft of new wasteful spending.

“It’s a little hard for me to take criticism from folks about this recovery package after they presided over a doubling of the national debt,” he said at the news conference. “I’m not sure they have a lot of credibility when it comes to fiscal responsibility.”

As Air Force One took him to Elkhart, Ind., where the unemployment rate has tripled to more than 15 percent in the last year, Mr. Obama and his aides sought again to reclaim the mantle of change, a theme central to his election victory.

His advisers depicted the president as the champion of people neglected by Washington politics.

“One thing that we learned over two years is that there’s a whole different conversation in Washington than there is out here,” said David Axelrod, the president’s senior adviser. “If I had listened to the conversation in Washington during the campaign for president, I would have jumped off a building about a year and a half ago.”

Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, decried what he called a “myopic viewpoint in Washington,” disconnected from the troubles of the country.

“It’s illuminating because it may not necessarily be where cable television is on all of this,” Mr. Gibbs said. “But you know, we’re sort of used to that. We lost on cable television virtually every day last year. So you know, there’s a conventional wisdom to what’s going on in America via Washington and there’s the reality of what’s happening in America.”

In case Republicans doubted who was in charge, Mr. Obama wrapped himself in the mantle of his election victory. At Concord High School in Elkhart, he basked in the roar of a crowd that chanted, “Obama, Obama.” To Obama aides nostalgic for the simpler days of the campaign trail, it had a familiar feel, even if the music had changed from Stevie Wonder to “Hail to the Chief.”

The point was reinforced when the White House distributed poll numbers indicating that twice as many Americans support Mr. Obama on the economy as they do Congressional Republicans.

But Mr. Obama’s aides disregarded other surveys showing that a bare majority approves of the package of spending and tax breaks. Republicans pointed to their alternative call for deeper tax cuts as a more effective way to get money quickly into the economy.

“It is not too late to craft a bipartisan plan that creates more jobs and helps get our economy back on track, and Republicans stand ready to work with the president to do this,” Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House Republican leader, said after the news conference.

For his part, though, Mr. Obama seemed to suggest it was too late, and that the time for bipartisanship lay further down the road. He said he recognized that some Republicans had good-faith doubts about his program, but he also characterized some of the opposition as an effort to “test” the new president.

He vowed to continue trying to build alliances with the other party in the hope that it “will pay some dividends over the long term,” and added: “As I continue to make these overtures, over time, hopefully that will be reciprocated.”

5) Obama's Conflicted Economic Language

President Barack Obama's first press conference earlier this evening was absolutely riveting. The man cannot make up his mind whether his stimulus / rescue / spending-is-the-whole-point bill emerging from the Senate is bipartisan or a rejection of Republicans who don't have "a lot of credibility" and whose failed polciies created this mess. Which is it? He wants to be congenial and condescending at the same time, and it does not work. As a snarky point, I do find it funny that the Democrats have been saying for six years that the war against Iraq was Bush unilateralism despite a dozen or so allied nations alongside America, yet less than half a dozen Republican votes makes the Senate bill "bipartisan."

The view inside the Beltway is that the President is rallying House Democrats - who love partisanship - to go along with him in support of the Senate bill. He's using feisty language they like. But baiting the Republicans is risky public relations, and there are real doubts about whether Obama's rhetorical fence-straddling will work in gathering House votes. The reality is that the two bills going into conference are different only in the this way: one is extremely liberal and the other is extremely liberal with a superficial bipartisan gloss.

The President took pains to mention that plenty of conservative economists, even economic advisers to Senator John McCain's campaign, support his approach. That invites me to disagree.

I am highly skeptical of Keynesian efforts to manage aggregate demand through fiscal policy, particularly when that policy aims to increase G when the problem is ultimately about the financial underpinnings of the entire system, and the primary symptom is a decline in consumption, C. When the President talks about a massive trillion dollar hole in the economy, he fundamentally means a collapse in private consumption, and I believe countering a massive downturn makes sense. What troubles me is that the President could have taken a genuinely bipartisan approach -- one where centrist Republicans essentially wrote the bill -- which would have used tax rate reductions to stimulate consumption. And really, isn't that the whole point?

Obama could have done that. It would have been bipartisan -- a Keynesian stimulus focused on the consumer. It would have moved very quickly and passed quickly. It might have focused on reducing, for instance, the payroll tax rate which is eats up roughly 15 percent of the first 90-some thousand dollars of take-home pay of most all working Americans. Meaning, cutting the payroll tax rate would be a genuinely progressive stimulus, with the benefits going to those, using the language popular among Democratic economists, most likely to spend it.

Obama could have done that! To put it bluntly, he did not.

Let the record show that I, for one, was willing to endorse that kind of bipartisan, tax-cutting Keynesian approach. It's hardly my principled choice, but I would have supported it. So I am more than a little put-off that he now castigates anyone who questions the wisdom of his big government spending approach as a member of the Bush administration. That's foolish, and it will backfire. Again, let the record show that I was never a Bushie. Nor was Jim Hamilton or Arnold Kling or hundreds of others who are not convinced about this particular stimulus approach.

Instead, we have a stimulus bill that is deeply divisive, and a President pretending it is something else. His press conference tonight was troubled by this paradox, which I suspect will not end well. It is not a sustainable argument, so public support is likely to fade.

Despite the core problem, the President had some very smart things to say tonight. I would like my conservative friends to give some credit where credit is due. So kudos, Mr. President. He also had some specific offenses that must be called out. Here then are the best and worst of Obama's comments tonight:

Smart Language

"create new jobs and new businesses, and help our economy grow again, now and in the future." This is a home run line for two reasons. First, it is incredibly refreshing to hear a Democratic president celebrating economic growth. Admit it, Republicans! Second, Obama understands that real growth comes from new jobs and new businesses, not industrial and agricultural policy aimed at jobs of the past. It is a profoundly Schumpeterian line.

"[N]ot a single earmark." The President is right, and this is a real achievement. Let's savor this, and remember it this fall.

"We are still going to have to make sure that we are attracting private capital, get the credit markets flowing again, because that's the lifeblood of the economy." (another leg of the stool). Even now, President Obama is reminding Americans that the financial crisis is not over. In the end, he may realize that this is not a stool, but a pyramid. And if we only have so many bricks, we might want to use them on the foundation. That would be the financial system.

Not So Smart Language

"It is only government that can break the vicious cycle." This lingo doubles as unhelpful and untrue. There is not one Ph.D. economist who believes the U.S. economy won't recover in 3 years from this recession (and most think it will be much faster) even if the government does nothing. I defy you to find one. Moreover, a depression has a self-fulfilling "animal spirits" heart, so the President needs to immediately start emphasizing that recovery will happen regardless. America is resilient, and it will bounce back. Sure, maybe the big, liberal stimulus bill will accelerate the recovery. I'm willing to concede that hypothetical. But let's have some humility from his rhetoric, which will help the country if not his cause.

"... repairing our dangerously deficient dams and levees so that we don't face another Katrina." Okay, stop with the veiled Katrina-Bush eye pokes. First, you literally can't stop hurricanes from happening again. Second, your implication that engineering can stop the flooding of homes built below sea level neglects a vastly smarter alternative: build communities above sea level. The broken windows lesson applies -- smart public spending can be better spent elsewhere.

"Well, I visited a school down in South Carolina that was built in the 1850s. Kids are still learning in that school, as best they can .... So why wouldn't we want to build state-of-the-art schools with science labs that are teaching our kids the skills they need for the 21st century?" Here, Obama is betraying his ignorance of federalism, and I find it appalling. I agree that shoddy schools are an outrage. The question is why the people of South Carolina tolerated it for, oh, 100+ years? Another question is why people in my state, which upgrades its school buildings, should pay for other states'? Subsidizing bad policy is offensive to me and every other American who takes the 10th amendment seriously.

"... it's a little hard for me to take criticism from folks about this recovery package after they've presided over a doubling of the national debt. I'm not sure they have a lot of credibility when it comes to fiscal responsibility." Okay, but is it so hard to take criticism from folks who had nothing to do with the doubling of the national debt? Why is Obama dismissing those voices?

6) The Chess Master
By BOB HERBERT

The president was taking heat for the tax problems of Tom Daschle, Timothy Geithner and other appointees and nominees. Liberal supporters of the president were upset that he was making such a high-profile effort to get Republicans to climb aboard his stimulus package bandwagon.

Self-styled middle-of-the-roaders were snarling that Mr. Obama was not doing enough bipartisan outreach, even as Republicans on Capitol Hill were attacking his economic package with the kind of venom usually reserved for the handiwork of Satan.

Mr. Obama was called a hypocrite, dismissed as both craven and politically naïve and taken to task for being too much in the public eye.

The president was even accused — oh, my goodness — of working in the Oval Office without his suit jacket on. And what was Mr. Obama doing as this chaos and tension and criticism swirled about him? Not surprisingly, keeping a level head.

Mr. Daschle, who was supposed to be the administration’s point person on health care reform, withdrew his nomination as secretary of health and human services, and Mr. Obama promptly took the blame for the foul-up. “I’ve got to own up to my mistake,” he said.

Polls showed that this went over very well with the public.

After making every effort — and failing — to generate significant G.O.P. support for the stimulus package, the president ratcheted up his rhetoric, pointing to the stunning job losses in January and sharply criticizing the Republicans’ obstructionist tactics. On Friday, a weakened but still enormous stimulus bill was agreed upon in the Senate, a crucial advance for Mr. Obama.

On Monday, he was on the road, making the case for his stimulus bill in Elkhart, Ind., which is enduring Depression-levels of joblessness and is desperate for federal assistance. Speaking to a crowded town-hall-style meeting, Mr. Obama said: “Endless delay or paralysis in Washington in the face of this crisis will only bring deepening disaster. I can tell you that doing nothing is not an option.”

The crowd cheered and supported him enthusiastically throughout his appearance.

There is always a tendency to underestimate Barack Obama. We are inclined in the news media to hyperventilate over every political or policy setback, no matter how silly or insignificant, while Mr. Obama has shown again and again that he takes a longer view.

There was no way, for example, that the Daschle flap was going to derail the forward march of a man who had survived the Rev. Jeremiah Wright fiasco. It’s early, but there are signs that Mr. Obama may be the kind of president who is incomprehensible to the cynics among us — one who is responsible and mature, who is concerned not just with the short-term political realities but also the long-term policy implications.

He has certainly handled himself much better than some of the clowns carrying leadership banners for the G.O.P. Michael Steele, the new Republican Party chairman, could barely contain his glee over the fact that no Republicans voted for the stimulus package in the House. “The goose egg that you laid on the president’s desk was just beautiful,” he said.

“This bill stinks,” said Lindsey Graham of South Carolina during the Senate debate on the package.

Representative Pete Sessions of Texas, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, made it clear that his party was committed to the low road when he talked about picking up pointers from the Taliban.

I’m not joking. “Insurgency, we understand perhaps a little bit more because of the Taliban,” said Mr. Sessions, in an interview with Hotline, which is part of NationalJournal.com.

The simple truth is that most Republican politicians would like Mr. Obama to fail because that is their ticket to a quick return to power. I think the president is a more formidable opponent than they realize.

Mr. Obama is like a championship chess player, always several moves ahead of friend and foe alike. He’s smart, deft, elegant and subtle. While Lindsey Graham was behaving like a 6-year-old on the Senate floor and Pete Sessions was studying passages in his Taliban handbook, Mr. Obama and his aides were assessing what’s achievable in terms of stimulus legislation and how best to get there.

I’d personally like to see a more robust stimulus package, with increased infrastructure spending and fewer tax cuts. But the reality is that Mr. Obama needs at least a handful of Republican votes in the Senate to get anything at all done, and he can’t afford to lose this first crucial legislative fight of his presidency.

The Democrats may succeed in bolstering their package somewhat in conference, but I think Mr. Obama would have been satisfied all along to start his presidency off with an $800 billion-plus stimulus program.

7) More US Oil - Is it a surprise?

The U.S. Geological Service issued a report in April ('08) that only scientists and oilmen knew was coming, but man was it big. It was a revised report (hadn't been updated since '95) on how much oil was in this area of the western 2/3 of North Dakota ; western South Dakota ; and extreme eastern Montana ... check THIS out: The Bakken is the largest domestic oil discovery since Alaska 's Prudhoe Bay , and has the potential to eliminate all American dependence on foreign oil. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates it at 503 billion barrels. Even if just 10% of the oil is recoverable... at $107 a barrel, we're looking at a resource base worth more than $5.3 trillion. 1.'When I first briefed legislators on this, you could practically see their jaws hit the floor. They had no idea.' says Terry Johnson, the Montana Legislature's financial analyst. 'This sizable find is now the highest-producing onshore oil field found in the past 56 years,' reports The Pittsburgh Post Gazette. It's a formation known as the Williston Basin , but is more commonly referred to as the 'Bakken.' And it stretches from Northern Montana , through North Dakota and into Canada . For years, U.S.oil exploration has been considered a dead end. Even the 'Big Oil' companies gave up searching for major oil wells decades ago. However, a recent technological breakthrough has opened up the Bakken's massive reserves... and we now have access of up to 500 billion barrels. And because this is light, sweet oil, those billions of barrels will cost Americans just $16 PER BARREL! That's enough crude to fully fuel the American economy for 41 years straight. 2. And if THAT didn't throw you on the floor, then this next one should - because it's from TWO YEARS AGO, people! U.S. Oil Discovery- Largest Reserve in the World! Stansberry Report Online - 4/20/2006 Hidden 1,000 feet beneath the surface of the Rocky Mountains lies the largest untapped oil reserve in the world is more than 2 TRILLION barrels. On August 8, 2005 President Bush mandated its extraction. They reported this stunning news: We have more oil inside our borders than all the other proven reserves on earth. Here are the official estimates: 8-times as much oil as Saudi Arabia18-times as much oil as Iraq21-times as much oil as Kuwait22-times as much oil as Iran500-times as much oil as Yemen and it's all right here in the Western United States . And HOW can this BE? HOW can we NOT BE extracting this!? Because the democrats, environmentalists and left wing republicans have blocked all efforts to help America become independent of foreign oil. James Bartis, lead researcher with the study says we've got more oil in this very compact area than the entire Middle East -more than 2 TRILLION barrels. Untapped. That's more than all the proven oil reserves of crude oil in the world today, reports The Denver Post. Don't think 'OPEC' will drop its price - even with this find? Think again! It's all about the competitive marketplace, - it has to. Got your attention/ire up yet? Hope so! Now, while you're thinking about it .. and hopefully P.O'd, do this: 3. Forward this e-mail to all your friends and associates. If you don't take a little time to do this, then you should stifle yourself the next time you want to complain about gas prices, because by doing NOTHING, you've forfeited your right to complain. Now I just wonder what would happen in this country if every one of you sent this to every one in your address book. See: http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=1911

8) Subject: "Why I am a Bad Jew" by Dr. Kaminski
By Rami Kaminski, MD

Why I Am a Bad Jew

For centuries, we lived in Berdichev. In the brutal Ukrainian winter of 1941, SS soldiers arrived there and rounded up eighty-seven members of my family - babies, young adults, octogenarians - stripped them naked, marched them to a nearby ditch, and executed them. Their lifeless bodies fell silently into a mass grave.

Like most Jews in Europe, my family "cooperated" with the Final Solution. They did not resist or fight back. Six million Jews were slaughtered in a period of four years. They received little sympathy while they were still alive and hunted down like animals. There was no public outcry because the Holocaust fit the world's narrative for Jews during the past 2000 years: a people destined to be persecuted and slaughtered.

During their two millennia in the Diaspora, Jews were not known to resist. There are few recorded instances in which Jews turned against their host nations or retaliated against their murderers. Instead, the survivors - if there were any - were expelled or left for another place. The murdered were regarded as "good" Jews. They accepted their fate helplessly, without resistance.

This narrative of the Jews has played out on the historical stage with boring monotony: Jews get killed because they are Jews. Nothing novel about it. After the Holocaust, however, the world, disgusted by this particularly ghoulish period of history, accorded some sympathy for the Jews.

Media commentary about the ongoing Gaza War reveals the world has now reverted to its pre-Holocaust perspective. Today, the only good Jew is a powerless Jew willing to become a dead one. The Zionist Revolution is to blame. It changed everything.

Jews re-created their own country.

The Arabs attacked the new Jewish state the day after independence and promised to complete Hitler's genocide. In succeeding decades, the Arabs attacked again and again. Strangely, the Jews, many of them refugees from Arab nations, adopted a surprising, new tactic: they fought back.

With Zionism, the Jews stubbornly refused to follow the centuries-old script. They refuse to be killed without resistance. As a result, the world has become increasingly enraged at their impertinence.

The recent events in Gaza and Mumbai make this plain. In 2005, Israel eliminated all Jewish presence in Gaza making it "Judenrein," and handed it over to the Palestinians. Left behind were synagogues and thriving green houses. The Arabs looted and destroyed them literally the day after Israel's withdrawal was complete. Where these structures once stood, the Palestinians built military bases and installed rocket launchers to shell Israeli civilians. To date, some 7,000 missiles have fallen on Israeli cities and towns, killing and maiming dozens, and sowing widespread terror. Medical studies reveal nearly all Jewish children in the communities bordering Gaza suffer from serious, trauma-induced illness.

The Gazan Palestinians then elected Hamas to lead them. Hamas proceeded to kill or imprison their political rivals, and its leaders, true to the Hamas charter, were unabashed in clearly stating their aims: they will not stop until they achieve their Final Solution, kill all the Jews, take over the land of Israel, and establish a theocracy governed by Islamic law.

As killing Jews for being Jews has been a national sport for centuries, Islamic militants are justified in believing they are merely fulfilling historical tradition in Argentina, India and Gaza.

Surely the Jews in Mumbai did not occupy Gaza. They were tortured and killed just for being Jews. And predictably, in the eyes of the world, they immediately became good Jews, just like my murdered family in Bertishev.

Good Jews would wait until Hamas has weapons enabling its members to achieve their ultimate goal of absolute mass murder. Those enraged by Israel's defensive military action insist Hamas uses only "crude" rockets, as if Qassams were BB guns, and military inferiority were somehow equivalent with moral superiority. In fact, Hamas now has Iranian-supplied Grad missiles which have landed on Be'er Sheva and the outskirts of Tel Aviv.

Westerners have had only sporadic exposure to the indiscriminant killing in the name of "holy war" which Israel has lived with for years.

Memories of 9-11, Madrid, and London have dimmed. This is not because the Islamic militants made a careful choice of weapons. They simply have not yet acquired nuclear bombs. Once they do, the West will develop a less detached view about the Islamists' professed intentions for the "infidels."

The only enlightened people in the civilized world who actually get it are the Israelis. They've not had time for detached philosophical ponderings. They've been too busy confronting the reality of Islamic fundamentalism.

Soon, Iran will have nuclear weapons. It will give them to Hezbollah and Hamas. Today, Jews must take a position: either be "good" Jews willing to be slaughtered without resistance, or be "bad" Jews who defend themselves at the cost of being pariahs of our enlightened world. Good Jews would wait for another six million to be murdered, and pick up to leave for another country to start the cycle again. The bad ones refuse to go calmly into the ditch.

I confess: I'm a bad Jew.


Rami Kaminski, MD, is Director and Founder of the Institute for Integrative Psychiatry in New York, a not-for-profit organization aimed at evaluating current psychiatric services and how they integrate with medicine, such as the mutual effects between medical and psychiatric conditions. Prior to that, Dr. Kaminkski was the Commissioner's Liaison to Families and Community and Medical Director of Operations at the New York State Office of Mental Health. Dr. Kaminski also holds an academic position as Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University. He earned recognition in 1990 from Mt. Sinai Hospital as Physician of the Year, and received the Exemplary Psychiatrist Awards from the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill. Dr. Kaminski's research explores neuropsychiatric aspects of brain disorders, such as Alzheimer and Parkinson's disease and movement disorders, as well as psychopharmacology of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders. He was for many years Director of The Schizophrenia research Unit at Mount Sinai Hospital in NYC. Dr. Kaminiski also served as the Medical Director of the PMHP and consultant to the committee in charge of developing the Special Needs Program.

9)Who Lost Europe? "In a generation or two, the US will ask itself: who lost Europe ?" Here is the speech of Geert Wilders, chairman Party for Freedom, the Netherlands, at the Four Seasons, New York, introducing an Alliance of Patriots and announcing the Facing Jihad Conference in Jerusalem. The speech was sponsored by the Hudson Institute on September 25, 2008.



Geert Wilders, Chairman, Party for Freedom, the Netherlands


Dear friends,

Thank you very much for inviting me. Great to be at the Four Seasons. I come from a country that has one season only: a rainy season that starts January 1st and ends December 31st. When we have three sunny days in a row, the government declares a national emergency. So Four Seasons, that's new to me.

It's great to be in New York. When I see the skyscrapers and office buildings, I think of what Ayn Rand said: "The sky over New York and the will of man made visible." Of course. Without the Dutch you would have been nowhere, still figuring out how to buy this island from the Indians. But we are glad we did it for you. And, frankly, you did a far better job than we possibly could have done.

I come to America with a mission. All is not well in the old world. There is a tremendous danger looming, and it is very difficult to be optimistic. We might be in the final stages of the Islamization of Europe. This not only is a clear and present danger to the future of Europe itself, it is a threat to America and the sheer survival of the West. The danger I see looming is the scenario of America as the last man standing. The United States as the last bastion of Western civilization, facing an Islamic Europe. In a generation or two, the US will ask itself: who lost Europe? Patriots from around Europe risk their lives every day to prevent precisely this scenario form becoming a reality.

My short lecture consists of 4 parts.
First I will describe the situation on the ground in Europe. Then, I will say a few things about Islam. Thirdly, if you are still here, I will talk a little bit about the movie you just saw. To close I will tell you about a meeting in Jerusalem. The Europe you know is changing. You have probably seen the landmarks. The Eiffel Tower and Trafalgar Square and Rome's ancient buildings and maybe the canals of Amsterdam. They are still there. And they still look very much the same as they did a hundred years ago.

But in all of these cities, sometimes a few blocks away from your tourist destination, there is another world, a world very few visitors see - and one that does not appear in your tourist guidebook. It is the world of the parallel society created by Muslim mass-migration. All throughout Europe a new reality is rising: entire Muslim neighborhoods where very few indigenous people reside or are even seen. And if they are, they might regret it. This goes for the police as well. It’s the world of head scarves, where women walk around in figureless tents, with baby strollers and a group of children. Their husbands, or slaveholders if you prefer, walk three steps ahead. With mosques on many street corner. The shops have signs you and I cannot read. You will be hard-pressed to find any economic activity. These are Muslim ghettos controlled by religious fanatics. These are Muslim neighbor hoods, and they are mushrooming in every city across Europe . These are the building-blocks for territorial control of increasingly larger portions of Europe, street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood, city by city. There are now thousands of mosques throughout Europe. With larger congregations than there are in churches. And in every European city there are plans to build super-mosques that will dwarf every church in the region. Clearly, the signal is: we rule.


Many European cities are already one-quarter Muslim: just take Amsterdam , Marseille and Malmo in Sweden . In many cities the majority of the under-18 population is Muslim. Paris is now surrounded by a ring of Muslim neighborhoods. Mohammed is the most popular name among boys in many cities. In some elementary schools in Amsterdam the farm can no longer be mentioned, because that would also mean mentioning the pig, and that would be an insult to Muslims. Many state schools in Belgium and Denmark only serve halal food to all pupils. In once-tolerant Amsterdam gays are beaten up almost exclusively by Muslims. Non-Muslim women routinely hear "whore, whore". Satellite dishes are not pointed to local TV stations, but to stations in the country of origin. In France school teachers are advised to avoid authors deemed offensive to Muslims, including Voltaire and Diderot; the same is increasingly true of Darwin . The history of the Holocaust can in many cases no longer be taught because of Muslim sensitivity. In England sharia courts are now officially part of the British legal system. Many neighborhoods in France are no-go areas for women without headscarves. Last week a man almost died after being beaten up by Muslims in Brussels, because he was drinking during the Ramadan. Jews are fleeing France in record numbers, on the run for the worst wave of anti-Semitism since World War II. French is now commonly spoken on the streets of Tel Aviv and Netanya, Israel. I could go on forever with stories like this. Stories about Islamization.

A total of fifty-four million Muslims now live in Europe. San Diego University recently calculated that a staggering 25 percent of the population in Europe will be Muslim just 12 years from now. Bernhard Lewis has predicted a Muslim majority by the end of this century.

Now these are just numbers. And the numbers would not be threatening if the Muslim-immigrants had a strong desire to assimilate. But there are few signs of that. The Pew Research Center reported that half of French Muslims see their loyalty to Islam as greater than their loyalty to France. One-third of French Muslims do not object to suicide attacks. The British Centre for Social Cohesion reported that one-third of British Muslim students are in favor of a worldwide caliphate. A Dutch study reported that half of Dutch Muslims admit they "understand" the 9/11 attacks.
Muslims demand what they call 'respect'. And this is how we give them respect. Our elites are willing to give in. To give up. In my own country we have gone from calls by one cabinet member to turn Muslim holidays into official state holidays, to statements by another cabinet member, that Islam is part of Dutch culture, to an affirmation by the Christian-Democratic attorney general that he is willing to accept sharia in the Netherlands if there is a Muslim majority. We have cabinet members with passports from Morocco and Turkey .

Muslim demands are supported by unlawful behavior, ranging from petty crimes and random violence, for example against ambulance workers and bus drivers, to small-scale riots. Paris has seen its uprising in the low-income suburbs, the banlieus. Some prefer to see these as isolated incidents, but I call it a Muslim intifada. I call the perpetrators "settlers". Because that is what they are. They do not come to integrate into our societies, they come to integrate our society into their Dar-al-Islam. Therefore, they are settlers.

Much of this street violence I mentioned is directed exclusively against non-Muslims, forcing many native people to leave their neighborhoods, their cities, their countries.Politicians shy away from taking a stand against this creeping sharia. They believe in the equality of all cultures. Moreover, on a mundane level, Muslims are now a swing vote not to be ignored. Our many problems with Islam cannot be explained by poverty, repression or the European colonial past, as the Left claims. Nor does it have anything to do with Palestinians or American troops in Iraq . The problem is Islam itself.

Allow me to give you a brief Islam 101:

The first thing you need to know about Islam is the importance of the book of the Quran. The Quran is "Allah's" personal word, revealed by an "angel" to Mohammed, the "prophet". This is where the trouble starts. Every word in the Quran is "Allah's" word and therefore not open to discussion or interpretation. It is valid for every Muslim and for all times. Therefore, there is no such a thing as moderate Islam. Sure, there are a lot of moderate Muslims. But a moderate Islam is non-existent.
The Quran calls for hatred, violence, submission, murder, and terrorism. The Quran calls for Muslims to kill non-Muslims, to terrorize non-Muslims and to fulfil their duty to wage war: violent jihad. Jihad is a duty for every Muslim, Islam is to rule the world - by the sword. The Quran is clearly anti-Semitic, describing Jews as monkeys and pigs.

The second thing you need to know is the importance of Mohammed the "prophet". His behavior is an example to all Muslims and cannot be criticized. Now, if Mohammed had been a man of peace, let us say like Ghandi and Mother Theresa wrapped in one, there would be no problem. But Mohammed was a warlord, a mass murderer, a pedophile, and had several marriages - at the same time. Islamic tradition tells us how he fought in battles, how he had his enemies murdered and even had prisoners of war executed. Mohammed himself slaughtered the Jewish tribe of Banu Qurayza. He advised on matters of slavery, but never advised to liberate slaves. Islam has no other morality than the advancement of Islam. If it is good for Islam, it is good. If it is bad for Islam, it is bad. There is no gray area or other side.Quran as "Allah's" own word and Mohammed as the perfect man are the two most important facets of Islam. Let no one fool you about Islam being a religion. Sure, it has a god, and a here-after, and 72 virgins. But in its essence Islam is a political ideology. It is a system that lays down detailed rules for society and the life of every person. Islam wants to dictate every aspect of life. Islam means 'submission'. Islam is not compatible with freedom and democracy, because what it strives for is sharia.If you want to compare Islam to anything, compare it to communism or national-socialism, these are all totalitarian ideologies.

This is what you need to know about Islam, in order to understand what is going on in Europe. For millions of Muslims the Quran and the life of Mohammed are not 14 centuries old, but are an everyday reality, an ideal, that guide every aspect of their lives. Now you know why Winston Churchill called Islam "the most retrograde force in the world", and why he compared Mein Kampf to the Quran.
Which brings me to my movie, Fitna.

I am a lawmaker, and not a movie maker. But I felt I had the moral duty to educate about Islam. The duty to make clear that the Quran stands at the heart of what some people call terrorism but is in reality jihad. I wanted to show that the problems of Islam are at the core of Islam, and do not belong to its fringes.
Now, from the day the plan for my movie was made public, it caused quite a stir, in the Netherlands and throughout Europe . First, there was a political storm, with government leaders, across the continent in sheer panic. The Netherlands was put under a heightened terror alert, because of possible attacks or a revolt by our Muslim population. The Dutch branch of the Islamic organization Hizb ut-Tahrir declared that the Netherlands was due for an attack. Internationally, there was a series of incidents. The Taliban threatened to organize additional attacks against Dutch troops in Afghanistan, and a web site linked to Al Qaeda published the message that I ought to be killed, while various muftis in the Middle East stated that I would be responsible for all the bloodshed after the screening of the movie. In Afghanistan and Pakistan the Dutch flag was burned on several occasions. Dolls representing me were also burned. The Indonesian President announced that I will never be admitted into Indonesia again, while the UN Secretary General and the European Union issued cowardly statements in the same vein as those made by the Dutch Government. I could go on and on. It was an absolute disgrace, a sell-out.

A plethora of legal troubles also followed, and have not ended yet. Currently the state of Jordan is litigating against me. Only last week there were renewed security agency reports about a heightened terror alert for the Netherlands because of Fitna.Now, I would like to say a few things about Israel . Because, very soon, we will get together in its capitol. The best way for a politician in Europe to loose votes is to say something positive about Israel . The public has wholeheartedly accepted the Palestinian narrative, and sees Israel as the aggressor. I, however, will continue to speak up for Israel .. I see defending Israel as a matter of principle. I have lived in this country and visited it dozens of times. I support Israel. First, because it is the Jewish homeland after two thousand years of exile up to and including Auschwitz, second because it is a democracy, and third because Israel is our first line of defense.Samuel Huntington writes it so aptly: "Islam has bloody borders". Israel is located precisely on that border. This tiny country is situated on the fault line of jihad, frustrating Islam's territorial advance. Israel is facing the front lines of jihad, like Kashmir, Kosovo, the Philippines, Southern Thailand, Darfur in Sudan, Lebanon , and Aceh in Indonesia . Israel is simply in the way. The same way West-Berlin was during the Cold War.

The war against Israel is not a war against Israel . It is a war against the West. It is jihad. Israel is simply receiving the blows that are meant for all of us. If there would have been no Israel , Islamic imperialism would have found other venues to release its energy and its desire for conquest. Thanks to Israeli parents who send their children to the army and lay awake at night, parents in Europe and America can sleep well and dream, unaware of the dangers looming.

Many in Europe argue in favor of abandoning Israel in order to address the grievances of our Muslim minorities. But if Israel were, God forbid, to go down, it would not bring any solace to the West. It would not mean our Muslim minorities would all of a sudden change their behavior, and accept our values. On the contrary, the end of Israel would give enormous encouragement to the forces of Islam. They would, and rightly so, see the demise of Israel as proof that the West is weak, and doomed. The end of Israel would not mean the end of our problems with Islam, but only the beginning. It would mean the start of the final battle for world domination. If they can get Israel, they can get everything. Therefore, it is not that the West has a stake in Israel. It is Israel.

It is very difficult to be an optimist in the face of the growing Islamization of Europe. All the tides are against us. On all fronts we are losing. Demographically the momentum is with Islam. Muslim immigration is even a source of pride within ruling liberal parties. Academia, the arts, the media, trade unions, the churches, the business world, the entire political establishment have all converted to the suicidal theory of multiculturalism. So-called journalists volunteer to label any and all critics of Islamization as a 'right-wing extremists' or 'racists'. The entire establishment has sided with our enemy. Leftists, liberals and Christian-Democrats are now all in bed with Islam.

This is the most painful thing to see: the betrayal by our elites. At this moment in Europe's history, our elites are supposed to lead us. To stand up for centuries of civilization. To defend our heritage. To honor our eternal Judeo-Christian values that made Europe what it is today. But there are very few signs of hope to be seen at the governmental level. Sarkozy, Merkel, Brown, Berlusconi; in private, they probably know how grave the situation is. But when the little red light goes on, they stare into the camera and tell us that Islam is a religion of peace, and we should all try to get along nicely and sing Kumbaya. They willingly participate in, what President Reagan so aptly called: "the betrayal of our past, the squandering of our freedom."

If there is hope in Europe, it comes from the people, not from the elites. Change can only come from a grass-roots level. It has to come from the citizens themselves. Yet these patriots will have to take on the entire political, legal and media establishment.Over the past years there have been some small, but encouraging, signs of a rebirth of the original European spirit. Maybe the elites turn their backs on freedom, the public does not. In my country, the Netherlands, 60 percent of the population now sees the mass immigration of Muslims as the number one policy mistake since World War II. And another 60 percent sees Islam as the biggest threat to our national identity. I don't think the public opinion in Holland is very different from other European countries.

Patriotic parties that oppose jihad are growing, against all odds. My own party debuted two years ago, with five percent of the vote. Now it stands at ten percent in the polls. The same is true of all similarly-minded parties in Europe. They are fighting the liberal establishment, and are gaining footholds on the political arena, one voter at the time.

Now, for the first time, these patriotic parties will come together and exchange experiences. It may be the start of something big. Something that might change the map of Europe for decades to come. It might also be Europe's last chance.This December a conference will take place in Jerusalem . Thanks to Professor Aryeh Eldad, a member of Knesset, we will be able to watch Fitna in the Knesset building and discuss the jihad. We are organizing this event in Israel to emphasize the fact that we are all in the same boat together, and that Israel is part of our common heritage. Those attending will be a select audience. No racist organizations will be allowed. And we will only admit parties that are solidly democratic.
This conference will be the start of an Alliance of European patriots. This Alliance will serve as the backbone for all organizations and political parties that oppose jihad and Islamization. For this Alliance I seek your support.

This endeavor may be crucial to America and to the West. America may hold fast to the dream that, thanks to its location, it is safe from jihad and shaira. But seven years ago to the day, there was still smoke rising from ground zero, following the attacks that forever shattered that dream. Yet there is a danger, even a greater danger than terrorist attacks, the scenario of America as the last man standing. The lights may go out in Europe faster than you can imagine. An Islamic Europe means a Europe without freedom and democracy, an economic wasteland, an intellectual nightmare, and a loss of military might for America - as its allies will turn into enemies, enemies with atomic bombs. With an Islamic Europe, it would be up to America alone to preserve the heritage of a Judeo-Christian life style.

Dear friends, liberty is the most precious of gifts. My generation never had to fight for this freedom, it was offered to us on a silver platter, by people who fought for it with their lives. All throughout Europe American cemeteries remind us of the young boys who never made it home, and whose memory we cherish. My generation does not own this freedom; we are merely its custodians. We can only hand over this hard won liberty to Europe 's children in the same state in which it was offered to us. We cannot strike a deal with mullahs and imams. Future generations would never forgive us. We cannot squander our liberties. We simply do not have the right to do so.This is not the first time our civilization is under threat. We have seen dangers before. We have been betrayed by our elites before. They have sided with our enemies before. And yet, then, freedom prevailed.

These are not times in which to take lessons from appeasement, capitulation, giving away, giving up or giving in. These are not times in which to draw lessons from Mr. Chamberlain. These are times calling us to draw lessons from Mr. Churchill and the words he spoke in 1942: "Never give in, never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy".

10)Tzipi Livni ballots two places ahead of Likud's Netanyahu - exit poll



Both claim lead spot for forming the next government.

Exit polls placed Tzipi Livni, with 29 Knesset seats (out of 120), two places ahead of former prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu's 28 in the general election for Israel's 18th Knesset Tuesday, Feb. 10. Avigdor Lieberman's right-wing Israel Beitenu came in third with 15, pushing Ehud Barak's Labor, the state's founding party, down to fourth place with 13 seats.

The right-of-center camp led by Netanyahu won an overall majority of 64 compared with the 56 left-of-center headed by Livni. Although her Kadima has pulled ahead, Livni will have to bargain hard for a government coalition and is challenged by Netanyahu. With the exit polls so close, the results may fluctuate by the time final results are in Wednesday morning.

Outgoing defense minister, Labor's Ehud Barak will be urged by his own party to join Livni. Kadima candidates are advising her to form a national unity government with Labor and Likud, awarding defense to Barak and Netanyahu foreign affairs, in order to leave the spectacularly successful nationalist Avigdor Lieberman's Israel Beitenu in the opposition.

If Livni does manage to horse-trade her way to forming a coalition government, she will be Israel's second woman prime minister after Golda Meir. Other results: Ultra-religious Shas polled 10 seats, United Torah 5, left-wing Meretz 4, Hadash (communists) 4, Balad – 4, Bayit Yehudi – 3, National Union – 3.

Foreign minister in the outgoing administration, a lawyer, former justice minister and Mossad staffer, Livni is untested in the two dominant popular concerns, security and the failing economy. An advocate of peace talks, she is generally considered a naïve negotiator and over-influenced by foreign colleagues and international opinion. Her campaign was a highly personal one, which kept her unimpressive list of candidates well in the wings.

The showing of Lieberman's Israel Beitenu cut deep into Netanyahu's right-of-center Likud and the religious parties, in the same way as Livni's relatively new Kadima sliced chunks off the traditional constituencies of defense minister Ehud Barak's Labor and the left-wing Meretz.

Netanyahu lost his early margin as frontrunner by miscalculating the strength of his rivals. Unlike Livni, he refrained from throwing himself into rough and ready contact with grass-roots voter and relied on the Internet to carry his message.

Instead of promoting the dream team he started out with, he cut a deal with Barak to join forces after the election and force Kadima to languish in opposition.

That deal boomeranged as the Labor leader lost ground. Livni hopes to snatch Likud's natural right-wing partner, Avigdor Lieberman's Israeli Beitenu, from under his nose by downplaying his ultra-nationalist super-security message.

Netanyahu and Barak are both former prime ministers. Netanyahu known as Bibi, campaigned on a clear tickets: No nuclear arms for Iran, no repartition of Jerusalem, no concession of the Golan and an end to Hamas rule of Gaza.

His term as prime minister from 1996 to 1999 ended with his defeat by Labor Party leader Ehud Barak, a former chief of staff and foreign minister.

As finance minister from 2001-2005 under Ariel Sharon, the Likud leader is credited with turning around the economy blighted by the Palestinian uprising, and fostering years of dramatic growth.

Lieberman, 50, who was born in Moldova, founded his party with the support of former Russian immigrants but won strong backing in this campaign from young soldiers across the board with his strong security message and slogan: "Lieberman understands Arabic!"