Where The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy Really Came From...

clipped from www.humanevents.com Hillary Clinton’s political methods were founded on the theories of a 1960s radical about whom she wrote her college thesis in 1969.  It may take a village to raise a child, but Clinton’s college thesis seems to say that the village politicos need an enemy to mobilize against. She titled the paper, written to fulfill her Bachelor of Arts degree at Wellesley College, “There is Only the Fight.” It praises the work of radical activist Saul Alinsky, a man who epitomized a self-interested no-holds barred campaign style that Hillary has emulated in later years. One year after Hillary turned in her thesis, Time Magazine profiled Alinsky. Their assessment was much different than hers. It said, “In his [Alinsky’s] view, the end of achieving power justifies a range of means…If the occasion requires, Alinsky’s forces will not refrain from spreading rumors about an antagonist or indulging in something that comes very close to blackmail.”

It's So Nice To Be Stoned

clipped from iowahawk.typepad.com 89  To be divyne we must first be diverse 90  So cheer thee well, thynges could be wors 91  Sharia is Englishe as tea and scones, 92  So everybody muste get stoned." 93  The pilgryms shuffled for the door 94  To face the rule of the Moor; 95  Poets, Professors, Starbucks workers 96  Donning turbans, veils and burqqas. 97  As they face theyr fynal curtan 98  Of Englande folk, one thynge is certan: 99  Dying by theyr own thousande cuts, 100  The Englande folk are folking nuts. 101 BURMA SHAVE

Move Along Now...

clipped from www.captainsquartersblog.com Mr. Clinton's action was opposed by the FBI, the Bureau of Prisons, the U.S. attorney offices that prosecuted the cases and the victims whose lives had been shattered. In contravention of standard procedures, none of these agencies, victims or families of victims were consulted or notified prior to the president's announcement. Who did want these prisoners released? Three members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, all from New York, had demanded action to release the FALN terrorists. Hillary needed their support in her upcoming Senate bid, and that of other Hispanic leaders.

Voluntary Consent(!)

clipped from www.atimes.com That makes a lurid lie out of Williams' bland assertion that adherence to sharia "assumes the voluntary consent or submission of the believer": Sharia depends for its legitimacy not on any human decision, not on votes or preferences, but on the conviction that it represents the mind of God ... while such universal claims are not open for re-negotiation, they also assume the voluntary consent or submission of the believer, the free decision to be and to continue a member of the umma. Williams was lying. His authority in matters of sharia is Ramadan, whom the Department of Homeland Security prevented from accepting an American university appointment. Frenchmen watched Ramadan defend the stoning of women for the crime of adultery in a televised debate with the present President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy

Funny In A Way

clipped from fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com It's a seemingly crazy world. The "Danish police said Tuesday they have arrested three people suspected of plotting to kill one of the 12 cartoonists behind the Prophet Muhammad drawings that sparked a deadly uproar in the Muslim world two years ago," according to the Associated Press. And this while a Canadian Human Rights Commission simultaneously investigates McLean's for having the temerity to reprint the cartoons. But only seemingly crazy. Underlying the issue of the cartoons is the deadly serious question of whether the West is at cultural war with Islam. But since the public can't talk about the possibility of a cultural war, it talks about the cartoons. Which is funny in a way.

Doesn't It?

clipped from minx.cc In a stunning turn of events, a high-level Muslim military aide blamed for costing an intelligence contractor his job will step down from his own Pentagon post, WND has learned. "Stunning" is the new "predictable." Meanwhile, his rival, Maj. Stephen Coughlin, a leading authority on Islamic war doctrine, may stay in the Pentagon, moving from the office of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the office of the secretary of defense. However, sources say a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey is trying to block his new contract. The top Pentagon aide, Egyptian-born Hesham H. Islam, came under a cloud of suspicion after reports raised doubt about his resume and contacts he had made with radical Muslims. He is expected to leave the government next month, officials say. Meanwhile, Coughlin is still fired, because of course this latest revelation shows how absurd the notion is that there's some deep connection between Islam and terrorism. Doesn't it?

The Death Sentence

clipped from littlegreenfootballs.com Christopher Hitchens has a good piece on the Archbishop’s sharia idiocy: The archbishop of Canterbury’s dangerous embrace of sharia. Picture the life of a young Urdu-speaking woman brought to Yorkshire from Pakistan to marry a man—quite possibly a close cousin—whom she has never met. He takes her dowry, beats her, and abuses the children he forces her to bear. She is not allowed to leave the house unless in the company of a male relative and unless she is submissively covered from head to toe. Suppose that she is able to contact one of the few support groups that now exist for the many women in Britain who share her plight. What she ought to be able to say is, “I need the police, and I need the law to be enforced.” But what she will often be told is, “Your problem is better handled within the community.” And those words, almost a death sentence, have now been endorsed and underwritten—and even advocated—by the country’s official spiritual authority.

On The Likelihood Of Chickens Roosting

clipped from online.wsj.com These superdelegates, Byzantine hyper-egalitarian Democratic Party delegate selection formulas, and the fact that many delegates are selected at conventions or by caucuses rather than primaries, combine to offer the distinct possibility that by convention time the candidate leading in the popular vote in the primaries will be trailing in the delegate count. How ironic. For over seven years the Democratic Party has fulminated against the Electoral College system that gave George W. Bush the presidency over popular-vote winner Al Gore in 2000. But they have designed a Rube Goldberg nominating process that could easily produce a result much like the Electoral College result in 2000: a winner of the delegate count, and thus the nominee, over the candidate favored by a majority of the party's primary voters.

What's All This Then About Medical Science?

clipped from corner.nationalreview.com Female Muslim medical students in the U.K. are refusing to scrub up to their elbows before getting, well, up to their elbows in someone else's guts, as baring ones arms is "immodest." Hey, you know what's really immodest? Claiming your religion as a pretext to justify giving other people staph infections.  Surely Rowan Williams will promptly volunteer for a bit of elected surgery by female Muslim docs just because he doesn't understand what all the fuss is about.

The Real Issue

clipped from corner.nationalreview.com Archbishop Williams makes an easy target for the country’s anxieties over failed Muslim assimilation. No-one’s afraid of retaliation from this gentle patriarch. Yet the same government officials who rebuke Williams and argue that Sharia law contradicts British values say nothing about Britain’s recent decision to grant welfare benefits to spouses in foreign polygamous marriages. It’s one thing to decry Williams’s remarks on Sharia, and quite another to openly oppose polygamy and cousin marriage. While Woolas has raised the question of birth defects, the most serious concern is that cousin marriage blocks assimilation. (I show how in "Assimilation Studies" and "Assimilation Studies, Part II.") That is why cousin marriage poses a genuine threat to Britain’s survival as a nation. The most spectacular example is today’s report that surveillance planes in Afghanistan have picked up the voices of Taliban fighters speaking in, for example, Bradford accents.

We Find Ourselves In A Wasteland...

clipped from littlegreenfootballs.com In the Anbar document, the author describes an Al Qaeda in crisis, with citizens growing weary of militants’ presence and foreign fighters too eager to participate in suicide missions rather than continuing to fight, said Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, a U.S. military spokesman. “We lost cities and afterward, villages... We find ourselves in a wasteland desert,” Smith quoted the document as saying. The memo — believed to have been written in summer 2007 — cites militants’ increasing difficulty in moving around and transporting weapons and suicide belts because of better equipped Iraqi police and more watchful citizens, Smith said.

They Mean Well...

clipped from drsanity.blogspot.com But gee, they mean well...just because their self-righteous and emotional posturing always seems to result in exactly the opposite outcome from what they say they intended--i.e., enabling our enemies, increasing our energy dependence, maintaining the poor and sick as perpetual victims of the evil capitalists--doesn't mean they aren't really swell guys and gals. Or, does it?

The word "mean" having multiple "meanings" of course

Every Man's Evidence

clipped from www.weeklystandard.com If that is suggestive, several other things also stand out in Risen's account of Operation Merlin that make the issuance of the federal subpoena more comprehensible. One of them is Merlin's highly sensitive nature. Risen himself notes that it was classified as SAP, a "special-access program," beyond top-secret. The significance of all this is hard to miss. Codebreaking and the interception of electronic transmissions are the crown jewels of American intelligence and guarded as such. James Risen is perfectly free to pursue a prize-winning journalistic career built upon promising confidentiality to sources within government. But there is an ancient and essential principle embodied in our democratically enacted laws: the public "has a right to every man's evidence" when our statutes are trampled upon. The rest of us are thus perfectly free to applaud that Risen is being compelled to testify about a crime that has been committed, a crime in this instance in which he is fully complicit.

Inspecting The ClintoNation

clipped from instapundit.com WHY GOOD PEOPLE DON'T GO INTO GOVERNMENT: "Howard Krongard worked his last day at the State Department recently, having learned a hard lesson in the ways of modern Congressional 'oversight.' To wit, if you don't follow Henry Waxman's orders, he'll try to ruin you. . . . Mr. Waxman doesn't much care if any of this is true, because his larger goal is to send a message to every Inspector General in government: They answer to him." Kind of like the Clintons and MSNBC.

Welcome To Christianity In Egypt

clipped from littlegreenfootballs.com

Witless Obama

clipped from www.commentarymagazine.com Obama’s problem isn’t that he’s on the wrong side. His problem is he’s the latest in a seemingly limitless supply of naïve Westerners who think they can reason with Syria’s tyrant Bashar Assad. “Washington must rectify the wrong policy of President George Bush in Lebanon and resort to an efficient and permanent diplomacy, rather than empty slogans,” he said. “What is bizarre about this sentence,” Lebanese political analyst Tony Badran said to me in an email, “is that the Lebanon policy has been precisely that. While Sen. Obama’s statement — and indeed conventional wisdom — tries to paint all Bush administration policies with the old brush of arrogant unilateralism, in reality, the Lebanon policy has always been a multilateral policy of consensus, through the UN security council, through international law, and through close partnership with European and regional allies like France and Saudi Arabia. It is unclear how Sen. Obama wishes to ‘replace’ that.

We Can't Imagine

clipped from tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com Other people, of course, may have different moral views. Dr. Goklany focuses on measures of the physical well-being of humans; others may attach more importance to the spiritual value and esthetic benefits of preserving ecosystems. But I think he points to a real risk in making large sacrifices today to address problems that will be easier to address when people are richer and more technologically advanced. If anything, Dr. Goklany writes, these projections underestimate the capacity of future generations to deal with these problems because they’ll have technologies we can’t imagine today (just as the advocates of draconian population-control policies during the 1960s didn’t envision that future famines would be averted thanks to improvements in agriculture).

IF it were true. But of course it's not.

Why Don't You People Write About This?

clipped from timescolumns.typepad.com A few weeks ago, I was chatting to a woman who works in an advocacy role for Muslim women in an area that, quite independently of the Bishop of Rochester, she described as a 'no-go area' for non-Muslims. Her clients were women in the process of being sectioned into mental health units in the NHS. This woman, who for obvious reasons begged not to be identified, told me: 'The men get tired of their wives. Or bored. Or maybe the wife objects to her daughter being forced into a marriage she doesn't want. Or maybe she starts wearing western clothes.There can be many reasons. The women are sent for asssessment to a hospital. The GP referring them is Muslim. The psychiatrist assessing them is Muslim and male. I have sat in these assessments where the psychiatrist will not look the woman patient in the eye because she is a woman. Can you imagine! A psychiatrist refusing to look his patient in the eye? Why don't you people write about this?'

The Failed Pagans

clipped from fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com I don’t believe that the West is running out of energy. I know it seems that way sometimes. I think we are just in a period of dramatic change. European Christianity, and in fact, European civilization, is dying. As Spengler at Asia Times Online puts it, the Europeans failed at being Christians and they failed at being pagans, and now it’s time for them to go. They know it, and that’s why they’ve quit having babies and spending money on defense. If they have no future, what would be the point?

Fearless Forecast

clipped from fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com How much of the blame laid at the feet of Islam is really the consequence of a substantial failure of the Western immune system, as exemplified by Rowan Williams' recent statements? People who die from AIDs technically succumb to some opportunistic infection. But it's really the HIV that killed them. The mistake was to think that Soviets were the problem. We were the problem. And right after the Wall fell those same people went rooting around for strange new gods to fall before. They worshipped dirt: Gaia. Crocodiles, snakes, snail darters and whatever else caught their fancy. Why should they not admire Islam? my fearless forecast is that if the world should ever be so unfortunate as to be convulsed with a WMD war, right after the last Muslim man, woman or child is blown to pieces, that we will be looking for some other thing to cut our throats. The disease is in us, but not in the way the Left understands it. We will never be free of our peril until we turn inward and free ourselves.

Shame On Us

clipped from fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com Someone once said you should never trust a cook who won't taste his own soup. But today we have 'environmentalists' who fly around in private jets; multimillionaire politicians who are 'champions of the poor' and 'Islamists' who profess a hatred for the West while applying for political asylum in it. But it's less a case of shame on them as it is shame on us.

Kyoto's End(point)

clipped from www.vhemt.org As VHEMT Volunteers know, the hopeful alternative to the extinction of millions of species of plants and animals is the voluntary extinction of one species: Homo sapiens... us. Each time another one of us decides to not add another one of us to the burgeoning billions already squatting on this ravaged planet, another ray of hope shines through the gloom. When every human chooses to stop breeding, Earth's biosphere will be allowed to return to its former glory, and all remaining creatures will be free to live, die, evolve (if they believe in evolution), and will perhaps pass away, as so many of Nature's "experiments" have done throughout the eons. It's going to take all of us going.

The Entropy This Time

clipped from fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com Probably the single most devastating critique of Rowan William's advocacy of Sharia law in Britain comes from a Muslim woman writing in the Independent. Look around the Islamic world where sharia rules and, in every single country, these ordinances reduce our human value to less than half that is accorded a male; homosexuals are imprisoned or killed, children have no free voice or autonomy, authoritarianism rules and infantilises populations. The really scary thing about Rowan Williams is not that he is deviant but actually representative of a certain type of soft-left individual who believes in Global Warming, organic food, and the "inevitability" of certain kinds of social engineering. How much better informed are the supporters of certain US Presidential candidates than Rowan Williams, for example? Ignorance is a form of entropy. And the West is running out of energy. Rowan Williams may have run out of energy sooner than the rest. He sees the future and it is now.

Shock And Dismay

clipped from liberalfascism.nationalreview.com As a liberal Democrat I hate to say this.  I do, however, find something unsettling about the way the left finds it perfectly appropriate to use fear-mongering about global warming to scare up votes, but then reacts in shock and dismay when Republicans use fear of terrorism to scare up votes. I'm not sure why "if you vote for Republicans temperatures will rise and Florida will sink into the ocean" is any better than "if you vote for Democrats terrorists will win and a nuclear bomb will go off in New York City."  To be sure, I find the later much more distasteful, but I'm not sure I can think of an intellectually satisfying reason why.

Whoops

clipped from littlegreenfootballs.com Yesterday we posted about the businesswoman in Saudi Arabia who was arrested, strip-searched, and threatened by the Saudi religious police because she was out in public with a male colleague. Today Fox News reports that two weeks before being arrested, the same woman had been boasting about how wonderful things were for women in Saudi Arabia—to President Bush’s brother Neil: American Woman Boasted of Saudi Freedoms To Bush Brother Before Arrest at Starbucks. Two weeks before Yara, an American businesswoman, was arrested by Saudi Arabia’s religious police for sitting with a male colleague at Starbucks, she said she strolled past the very same cafe with another businessman: Neil Bush. But on Monday, Yara learned that she had been wrong. She was thrown in jail, strip-searched, threatened and forced to sign false confessions by the kingdom’s “Mutaween” police. “When I was arrested, it was like going through an avalanche,” she said. “All of my beliefs were completely destroyed.”

They Lie To Each Other But Not To Us?

clipped from littlegreenfootballs.com A distinguishing characteristic of many militant Islamic fanatics is that they’re easily led by pride and ego to reveal things they shouldn’t: Hamas: We’re Allowed to Lie. (IsraelNN.com) Hamas leaders spoke to the Arabic language Ash-Sharq il-Awsat newspaper recently and explained that as Muslims, they are allowed to lie.  In an interview printed on Thursday, senior Hamas terrorists explained, “A Muslim is permitted to say things that oppose his beliefs in order to prevent damages or to be saved from death.”  This approach, known in Arabic as “taqiyya,” was behind several Hamas leaders’ recent public expression of support for Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, they explained. The sources quoted in Ash-Sharq il-Awsat explained that the Samarian terrorists’ announcement was not a sign of dissent within Hamas ranks, but rather a permitted use of “taqiyya” to deceive Abbas and avoid prison sentences.

The Nexus

clipped from www.captainsquartersblog.com The massive loan may not seem unusual given Mitt Romney's self-funding, but Mitt has plenty of his own money. Where did Hillary get $5 million to loan a presidential campaign? Bill and Hillary have done well on the speaking circuit, and Bill recently got $20 million or so for backing out of his partnership from Ron Burkle. At the time, speculation had Bill wanting to eliminate any potential conflicts between Burkle's business and Hillary's election. Now, however, one has to wonder whether Burkle may have attempted to float money into Hillary's campaign while bypassing campaign-finance regulations. Did the $20 million, which came just two weeks ago, actually represent a fair-market settlement for Clinton's services and ownership stake in Yucaipa? Or did Burkle inflate it in order to allow Hillary to "loan" herself $5 million to keep pace with a surging Obama campaign? The Clintons always seem to live at the nexus of questions regarding cash and politics.

Good Luck To You, Senator

clipped from www.cbsnews.com As I noted, I initially believed you shared that goal. But I understand how important the opportunity to lead your party’s effort to exploit this issue must seem to a freshman Senator, and I hold no hard feelings over your earlier disingenuousness. Again, I have been around long enough to appreciate that in politics the public interest isn’t always a priority for every one of us. Good luck to you, Senator.

Pining For Che'

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com Finally, young Cubans use internet video to embarrass the Communist dictatorship. I especially enjoyed an innocent question by a "self-avowed revolutionary" who wondered why Cubans aren't allowed to travel. She said she "would very much like to visit the place in Bolivia where Ernesto 'Che' Guevara was killed." My kind of revolutionary.

The Race Condition

clipped from fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com Whether or not an explicit attitude towards Islamic doctrine has any practical effect on fighting Islamic terrorism is a question has been discussed in earlier posts. But the question of how to think about the issues Coughlin raises creates thorny issues. While it is certainly conceivable that Islam itself is hostile to Western civilization any official acknowledgment of the possibility would be politically explosive. So Coughlin's questions are examined in a parallel process. The concept, familiar to programmers, happens when multiple threads with different code executes on the same data. In this case official strategy is "constrained" -- as Coughlin puts it -- to process Islamic doctrines with a 'politically correct' algorithm. Parallel processing, following the analogy, has known pitfalls. Their outputs may clash when they attempt to merge. Or the conclusion of one thread pre-empts the other by finishing ahead, the so-called 'race condition'.

Moving On

clipped from fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com You would think that politicians would see horror scenarios coming faster than the feckless characters of B-movies. But that is apparently not the case. They didn't see either of the World Wars coming until it was too late. Politics, like cheap wine, does not improve with age. Baer writes: Walls aside, what Israel sorely misses is the capacity to strike fear into its neighbors, deterrence. The Winograd Commission spelled it out in bleak terms in its report on Israel's failures during the 34-day war. "Israel cannot survive," the official statement said, unless it is able to deter its enemies — teach Hamas and Hizballah a lesson they won't forget. Forgetting -- or "moving on" as it is now called -- is the politician's stock-in-trade. If voters remembered everything they would forgive nothing. No. In our mutable world "never again" means "never mind".

A Fine State

clipped from www.davidwarrenonline.com The biggest spectacle of the week, was the “breakout” from Gaza of several hundred thousand Palestinians, after Hamas agents took out much of the high wall that separates the Gaza Strip from Egypt, in a series of explosions after months of undermining the structure with acetylene torches and similar labour-intensive tools. The media accounts of this event were incoherent, and understandably so. For even people in the Bush administration were puzzled, and I found myself being asked if I could explain it to more than one of them. When the people who supposedly control the CIA and the State Department are reduced to asking armchair journalists to explain breaking news, well: the world is in a fine state, isn't it? My first comment, at least to them, had to be: “So why did you fire all your neoconservatives?”

The Unadmitted 30s ... And Counting ...

clipped from www.davidwarrenonline.com While President Bush was throwing money into a recession in Washington, unprecedented Islamist demonstrations were erupting across Egypt, almost unreported in our media. As I was beginning to explain in my Saturday column, it is not generally appreciated that Hamas, which controls Gaza, is of Egyptian descent. And by the brilliant stroke of blowing down the wall at the Egyptian border, they have now invaded Egypt proper. Among the slogans being shouted in Egypt's streets: “Arm us, train us, send us to Gaza!” The rhetorical target is Israel. The actual target is the “moderate” Egyptian government, and the response to these rallies, from the authorities, and from Egypt's formerly-articulate “middle class,” is panic. In Egypt as elsewhere, to say that “the great majority of Muslims are peaceful, unaggressive people, just trying to get on with their lives” is to utter something deeply fatuous. The great majority of Germans were likewise, in the 1930s.

We Can Only Hope

clipped from fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com The Iraqis in Anbar have completely rejected Al Qaeda. A while back I told the police chief in my town that I thought the reason the terrorists are weak is because their ideas have been rejected. He said, "In 2002 and 2003, we thought Al Qaeda was just another Muslim group. Now, you can go far out into the desert and talk to even a shepherd, and he will tell you that he hates Al Qaeda. One hundred years from now, you will be able to go into the desert and talk to a shepherd and he will still tell you that he hates Al Qaeda." So, having rejected extremism, what is left? They are still Muslim in my town, but I wouldn't call them devout -- they go to the mosque and pray, and mention God in everyday conversations -- as do I to them -- and granted, I certainly don't know or interact with all of them, but I don't think that "moderate Islam" fully captures who they are. In fact, religion is almost irrelevant in the conversations I have with local leaders.

Pigs A Leapin'

clipped from littlegreenfootballs.com What’s gotten into Newsweek magazine? This article by George Weigel is way off their usual politically correct line: The War Against Jihadism. What kind of campaign is this? Six-plus years after 9/11; while the Taliban attempts an Afghanistan comeback; as Islamist terrorists cause mayhem in Algeria and occupy huge swaths of tribal Pakistan; despite “United 93” and “The Kite Runner,” a library-full of books, presidential commissions, congressional hearings, and four election cycles—despite all of that, a strange, Victorian reticence about naming the enemy in the contest for the human future in which we are engaged befogs this political season. Such reticence is an obstacle to victory in a war we cannot avoid and in which we must prevail.

Houses Like ATMs

clipped from instapundit.com SO I'M WATCHING MCCAIN TALK ABOUT THE SUBPRIME CRISIS, and how there may be some "greedy people on Wall Street who need to go to jail." But I heard a typically sad-toned NPR story on subprimes tonight, and despite their best efforts to evoke the Joads it was a story of people who "used their houses like ATMs," taking out home equity loan after home equity loan when they started with a subprime mortgage, only to wind up owing far more than their houses were worth and unable to make the payments. Boo hoo. Shouldn't there be a price for being an idiot? And -- despite not being on Wall Street -- a greedy idiot? Why does McCain want to bail these people out? Why does he want to put Wall Street people in jail?

The Political Storm (Worm)

clipped from blog.washingtonpost.com Dmitri Alperovitch, director of intelligence analysis and hosted security for San Jose, Calif.-based Secure Computing, said federal law enforcement officials who need to know have already learned the identities of those responsible for running the Storm worm network, but that U.S. authorities have thus far been prevented from bringing those responsible to justice due to a lack of cooperation from officials in St. Petersburg, Russia, where the Storm worm authors are thought to reside. Alperovitch blames the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin and the political influence of operatives within the Federal Security Service (the former Soviet KGB) for the protection he says is apparently afforded to cybercrime outfits such as RBN and the Storm worm gang. when you have the whole money aspect injected into it, this changes the playing field and may make it a bit more difficult to track down who it might be or prove more succinctly that they wrote it."

One Bomb State Update

clipped from drsanity.blogspot.com Here is an interesting news item regarding Israel's analysis of Iran's nuclear capability: Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said, in an interview published Saturday, that Iran is "quite advanced" in its work on atomic weapons and may already be fashioning a nuclear warhead. "Our interpretation is that clearly the Iranians are aiming at nuclear capability," he said. "It's probably true that ... they may have slowed down the weapons group in 2003, because it was the height of American militarism." But he said Israel now believed that Iranians "are quite advanced, much beyond the level of the Manhattan Project." Call it the Tehran Project, if you will.

Kick The Can (Part 72355)

clipped from fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com There seems to be a bipartisan political consensus not to examine the subject of political Islam publicly. It is the most verboten of foreign policy subjects. But like other "open secrets", its exclusion from formal discussion doesn't banish it from public consciousness. It merely pushes it underground, like Barack Obama's middle name. The key problem with subjecting the question of political Islam to debate is that every other conclusion except that of regarding it as a "religion of peace" implies consequences no one dares face. Concluding that Islam is a 'religion of war' would precipitate a revolution in diplomacy, energy policy and military strategy. It's a bottle of nitro nobody wants to shake; it's a can of worms nobody wants to open: not a Republican administration and most especially not a Democratic one.