Like Slimey Cockroaches & their crooked President, Liberals Spread Disease

[Warph]

Texas Small Business Owner: "We Built This, Obama Can Kiss Our A$$"
http://www.rigzone.com/search/sites/Seamar_Divers_International_LLC3453.asp

Another small business owner tells Barack Obama to – "Kiss our a$$."
Eloy Anaya is President/CEO of Seamar Divers International, in Stafford, Texas.


                           


                            For the record... More Than Twice As Many Small Business Owners
                                         Support Mitt Romney Over Barack Obama

                           

It's no secret that Barack Obama is bent on destroying small business.

The Washington Post reported:

Main Street has already proved an important battleground in the presidential election. So which candidate is winning the favor of small business owners?

Mitt Romney, and it's not even close, according to a new poll.

Sixty-one percent of small business owners plan to vote for the Republican challenger, more than double the 26 percent who say they will vote for President Obama, shows a survey released Tuesday by Manta. The president's numbers have fallen six points since May, while Mitt Romney has picked up four points with business owners. In the latest national polls, the candidates are virtually deadlocked.

Obama still has time to make up ground on Main Street, but he will need a solid performance next month in Charlotte. Forty percent of respondents said their vote could swing based on the small business issues — namely taxes, healthcare and regulations — discussed at the conventions, while one in four said they're still waiting to see what types of initiatives the candidates outline between now and November.[/font][/size]

[Warph]

         

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2011/06/topless_bowery.php

I, for one, support what Moira Johnson is doing.

According to The Huffington Post & the Village Voice, Johnson, an exotic dancer by night, has by day been walking around New York City topless to advocate a woman's right to go shirtless.

This is an equal rights issue, you see. Johnson and other topless lasses want to know why men are free to trot around shirtless anytime, anywhere, but women are not.  After all, men have breasts, too.

But maybe Johnson has a point.

Where upper-torso nudity is concerned, maybe there is a double standard, and maybe we need to shed it like some old T-shirt, as we have so many outmoded standards of the past.

It wasn't long ago that women were expected to stay at home and attend to the needs of men.  But nobody thinks this way anymore.

In fact, many men these days prefer that their wives work and make a boatload of money.  They see no shame in staying home with the kids and clapping the first time Junior uses the toilet to do No. 2.

It used to be that women were expected to be soft and feminine, much like actresses in the old movies, but that's no longer true.

Women's professional basketball is as exciting and competitive as any male sport.  Women now have their own professional football league.  And on ESPN, professional female boxers do things to each other that make Mike Tyson look like a Quaker.

It used to be that women needed husbands to have kids, but that's no longer true, either.  Famous women who have dough are not only shunning husbands, they think they're better off without them.

We men are stinky and hairy.  We mess up the bathroom.  We make loud noises when we eat.  We snore when we sleep.

Regrettably, though some women may think they're better off without us, we don't fare so well without them.  We find ourselves waking up in a pile of dirty laundry and newspapers, still clenching the tequila bottle we began drinking from three days earlier.

In these modern times, then, is it right that American society tolerates men walking around shirtless without extending this same basic freedom to women?

After all, many attractive European women are allowed to go topless.  Sure, they don't frequently bathe or shave their armpits, but you can't have everything.

Perhaps this topless thing is just another example of our rigid thinking, in which we hold an opinion on how women should act without really thinking it through.  So let's think it through.

What if more American women conducted their daily business topless?  I assure you that would prompt me to get out of the house more often. I'd spend every waking moment, to quote the great Dean Martin, "standing on the corner watching all the girls go by."

Besides, many towns, including New York City, have no laws on the books that say it is illegal for women to walk around topless. Johnson was arrested for her topless protests, but the cops had to let her go.

In any event, as many Americans sit idly by while their government strips away all kinds of freedoms... such as a religious organization's freedom to not have the government tell it what health insurance plan it must buy.... I suppose someone standing up for any kind of freedom is a good thing.

So I support all lasses who go topless on International Go Topless Day... I'm not making that up....  ( http://gotopless.org/ )...   which is on Aug. 26.

Because the freedom to go topless may soon be one of the few freedoms we have left.



Just imagine what our girl will wear tomorrow, when we hit 99 degrees!

Update: About the legality of female toplessness in the NYcity...
We emailed NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Public Information Paul Browne our original post, asking whether or not this woman was breaking the law. He replied:

"The state's highest court established long ago that women have the same right as men to appear topless in public. Absent a link to some commercial enterprise or promotion, the woman's lack of certain attire in this instance does not appear to be a police matter."

So.... Yes, Ladies, You Can Walk Around the City Topless



Also, Women March Topless at Venice Beach for Equal Rights

Also...Topless Woman Went to Midtown and Central Park, Too:



[/font][/size]

[Warph]

   

Trapping Season
By Cal Thomas
8/23/2012

It's trapping season. The targets are Republicans, whom the Democratic-friendly media (the trappers) hunt in order to smear -- especially the Romney-Ryan ticket -- forcing them off message.

The bait in the latest case is the issue of abortion in cases of rape. The hunter's target was Rep. Todd Akin, a Missouri Republican, who is running for the Senate against Democratic incumbent Claire McCaskill.

Thirty-nine years after Roe v. Wade and subsequent Supreme Court rulings legalizing abortion, one might think a pro-lifer like Todd Akin would be able to see he was walking into a trap when a St. Louis TV reporter asked him whether abortion should be allowed, even in cases of rape. He didn't.

Akin responded that if the rape is "legitimate" the female body "has ways to try and shut that whole thing down," that "thing" being conception. Trap set and sprung. He should have said that while rape is a horrible crime that should be prosecuted, the number of pregnancies from that criminal act pale in comparison to the greater number of unwanted pregnancies ending in abortion.

After criticism from many points on the political spectrum, including the Romney-Ryan ticket, which said it would not seek to prevent abortion in cases of rape, Akin attempted to walk back his comments: "In reviewing my off-the-cuff remarks, it's clear that I misspoke in this interview, and it does not reflect the deep empathy I hold for thousands of women who are raped and abused every year." He issued an apology which he included in a hastily recorded campaign ad, but it may be too late to undo the political damage.

McCaskill, up for re-election this fall, has seized on the opportunity to use Akin's answer much as Republicans are using President Obama's "you didn't build that" line about small businesses. The Democratic and pro-choice fundraising letters are already in the mail.

According to the Washington Post, "Research published in the Journal of American Obstetrics and Gynecology suggests over 30,000 pregnancies result from rape annually. 'Rape-related pregnancy occurs with significant frequency,' the trio of researchers from the University of South Carolina concluded. 'It is a cause of many unwanted pregnancies.' A separate 2001 study -- which used a sample of 405 rape victims between ages 12 and 45 -- found that 6.4 percent became pregnant." The U.S. Department of Justice's National Crime Victimization Survey found there is an average of 207,754 rape victims (age 12 or older) each year.

If Akin wanted to comment on abortion, which numerous polls indicate is a low priority for most voters in this election, when asked what he thought about abortion in cases of rape, he should have made the pro-choice side explain how they can defend more than 50 million abortions in the U.S. since 1973. He should have said that there are thousands of women's health centers available to assist women and their unborn children in a variety of ways. Abortion is not the only option.

Democrats and their friends in big media protect their own when accused of outrageous acts. Topping a long list is the late Senator Ted Kennedy, who drove off a bridge in Chappaquiddick, Mass., leaving a woman, not his wife, to drown. In 1978, Juanita Broaddrick, a Clinton campaign worker, accused Bill Clinton, then the attorney general of Arkansas, of rape. His advice for the fat lip he gave her, according to Broaddrick, was you'd "better get some ice for that." Clinton, Kennedy and many other Democratic (and, yes, some Republicans) engaged in outrageous behavior, but continued to serve in office. Akin is guilty of using the wrong words and Republicans run from him like scalded dogs.

Akin considers himself an "absolutist" when it comes to life. Theologically and morally he is right, but in what Scripture refers to as a "wicked and adulterous generation," he is unlikely to advance the pro-life cause by publicly stating this position during a volatile election season when the Senate majority is up for grabs.
Akin shouldn't have to compromise his position. But if the goal is to reduce the number of abortions, focusing on pregnancy from rape does not advance that worthy objective.

[Warph]

Reckless Lunacy
By Oliver North
8/24/2012

WASHINGTON -- Americans following this year's presidential campaign would never know it from mainstream media coverage, but the commander in chief we hired four years ago has set the United States on a course for unilateral disarmament. The following people hope you won't notice until after Nov. 6: Vladimir Putin, Liang Guanglie, Kim Jong-un, Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Sayyed Ali Hosseini Khamenei, Abdul Fattah al-Sisi, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, A.Q. Khan and of course, Barack Obama.

The 10 individuals above share a common fascination: nuclear weapons. Vladimir Putin, Russia's modern czar; Liang Guanglie, minister of national defense for the People's Republic of China; Kim Jong-un, North Korea's "Great Successor;" and Pakistan's Chief of Army Staff, Gen. Kayani, already have such weapons of mass destruction in their hands, the means of delivering them and are racing to build more. Messer's Khamenei -- Iran's supreme leader; Gen. al-Sisi, Egypt's new defense minister; Turkey's Prime Minister Erdogan; Saudi Crown Prince Salman and Pakistan's "nuclear physicist for hire" A.Q. Khan -- are all aspirants to the exclusive nuclear weapons club -- and engaged in various stages of building many more such devices. As for Barack Obama -- he just wants to get rid of all nuclear weapons -- starting with ours.

           

To many Americans, that sounds a lot like an invitation to disaster. To Global Zero, an international movement dedicated to the elimination of all nuclear weapons, that sounds like a great idea. Barack Obama says, "Global Zero will always have a partner in me and my administration." And he's not just talking the talk; he's walking the walk.

This is the president who showed us how to "lead from behind" on the "responsibility to protect" Libyan civilians from the depredations of a tinhorn despot such as Moammar Gadhafi. But when it comes to exposing American citizens to the horrific threat of being incinerated by incoming nuclear weapons -- he's out in front.

It all started with a Nobel Peace Prize and the infamous Russian "reset button." In September 2009, in a blatant effort to show how committed he is to nuclear nonproliferation, Obama abruptly cancelled plans to deploy ballistic missile defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic. A month later, the Nobel Committee in Oslo, Norway, voted to give him the 2009 Peace Prize. It all went downhill from there.

To show the world that he was worthy of the honor, our Nobel laureate rushed into negotiations with Russia on a new strategic arms reduction treaty. Obama and Russia's then-president Dmitry Medvedev closed the deal on April 8, 2010 -- cutting the U.S. nuclear arsenal in half -- from roughly 3,000 to less than 1,700 warheads. Then, on Dec. 22, in haste to adjourn for Christmas recess, and despite warnings from patriots such as South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint, the Senate recklessly ratified the treaty. By Feb. 2, 2011, when the president inked the New START Treaty -- that's what he calls it -- the treaty's pro-Moscow bias was evident. To avoid embarrassing questions about damage to our national security, Obama banned the press from the Oval Office signing ceremony.

Unfortunately, the one-sided U.S.-Russia START agreement is just the tip of the iceberg. In arguing for senate ratification of START, Obama promised to immediately begin modernizing the remaining inventory of U.S. nuclear weapons and taking steps to preserve our nuclear triad: land-based ICBMs, strategic bombers and ballistic missile submarines. He lied.

The warhead modernization program is all but defunct. Most of our geriatric ICBMs are over 40 years old; our submarine-launched ballistic missiles are a quarter-century old; and some of the aircraft designated to respond to a nuclear attack on the U.S., with weapons in kind, are twice as old as the 30-year-old pilots flying them. The rest of the world -- Russia included -- is rushing to design and build modern equivalents for all these systems. The O-Team isn't.

Degrading the U.S. offensive nuclear capability and its deterrent factor is bad enough, but the Obama administration's unilateral disarmament plan goes even further -- by eliminating defensive systems to protect our homeland and the American people. They have already killed three promising airborne and space-based missile defense programs and drastically reduced the number of U.S.-based interceptors.

When I was at the Naval Academy, I was a boxer. What Obama has done is tantamount to sending a boxer into the ring against seven opponents, with his hands shackled around his waist. He can't throw a punch. He can't even put up his hands to defend himself.

Worse, we don't know what else is secretly "on the table" in this effort to gut America's defenses. Reporters covering the presidential campaign ask about every conceivable issue but pose no questions about what Obama meant last March when he was overheard begging Medvedev to ask Putin for more "space" until after the election, when he would have "more flexibility." Since then, the O-Team has shrugged off Russian bombers inadvertently penetrating U.S. airspace and a Russian sub trolling around in the Gulf of Mexico.

Arizona Congressman Trent Franks, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, described Obama administration plans to make further cuts in our nuclear deterrence as "reckless lunacy." So, too, is rehiring a commander in chief hellbent on unilateral disarmament.

[Warph]

The Cordesman Criteria

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/charles-krauthammer-the-cordesman-criteria/2012/08/23/b0a618b6-ed45-11e1-9ddc-340d5efb1e9c_story.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions

By: Charles Krauthammer
8/23/2012 08:00 PM

WASHINGTON — Either Israel is engaged in the most elaborate ruse since the Trojan Horse or it is on the cusp of a pre-emptive strike on Iran's nuclear facilities.

What's alarming is not just Iran's increasing store of uranium or the growing sophistication of its rocketry. It's also the increasingly menacing annihilationist threats emanating from Iran's leaders. Israel's existence is "an insult to all humanity," says President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. "Anyone who loves freedom and justice must strive for the annihilation of the Zionist regime." Explains the country's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Israel is "a true cancer tumor on this region that should be cut off."

Everyone wants to avoid military action, surely the Israelis above all. They can expect a massive counterattack from Iran, 50,000 rockets launched from Lebanon, Islamic Jihad firing from Gaza and worldwide terror against Jewish and Israeli targets, as happened last month in Bulgaria.

Yet Israel will not sit idly by in the face of the most virulent genocidal threats since Nazi Germany. The result then was 6 million murdered Jews. There are 6 million living in Israel today.

Time is short. Last-ditch negotiations in Istanbul, Baghdad and Moscow have failed abjectly. The Iranians are contemptuously playing with the process. The strategy is delay until they get the bomb.

What to do? The sagest advice comes from Anthony Cordesman, military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, hardheaded realist and a believer that "multilateralism and soft power must still be the rule and not the exception."

He may have found his exception. "There are times when the best way to prevent war is to clearly communicate that it is possible," he argues. Today, the threat of a U.S. attack is not taken seriously. Not by the region. Not by Iran. Not by the Israelis, who therefore increasingly feel forced to act before Israel's more limited munitions — far less powerful and effective than those in the U.S. arsenal — can no longer penetrate Iran's ever-hardening facilities.

Cordesman therefore proposes threefold action:

1. "Clear U.S. redlines."
It's time to end the ambiguity about American intentions. Establish real limits on negotiations — to convince Iran that the only alternative to a deal is pre-emptive strikes, and to convince Israel to stay its hand.

2. "Make it clear to Iran that it has no successful options."
Either their program must be abandoned in a negotiated deal (see No. 1 above) on generous terms from the West (see No. 3 below) or their facilities will be physically destroyed. Ostentatiously let Iran know about the range and power of our capacities — how deep and extensive a campaign we could conduct, extending beyond just nuclear facilities to military-industrial targets, refineries, power grids and other concentrations of regime power.

3. Give Iran a face-saving way out.
Offer Iran the most generous possible terms — economic, diplomatic and political. End of sanctions, assistance in economic and energy development, trade incentives and a regional security architecture. Even Russian nuclear fuel.

Tellingly, however, Cordesman does not join those who suggest yielding on nuclear enrichment. That's important because a prominently leaked proposed "compromise" would guarantee Iran's right to enrich, though not to high levels.

In my view, this would be disastrous. Iran would retain the means to potentially produce fissile material, either clandestinely or in a defiant breakout at a time of its choosing.

Would Iran believe a Cordesman-like ultimatum? Given the record of the Obama administration, maybe not. Some (though not Cordesman) have therefore suggested the further step of requesting congressional authorization for the use of force if Iran does not negotiate denuclearization.

First, that's the right way to do it. No serious military action should be taken without congressional approval (contra Libya). Second, Iran might actually respond to a threat backed by a strong bipartisan majority of the American people — thus avoiding both war and the other nightmare scenario, a nuclear Iran.

If we simply continue to drift through kabuki negotiations, however, one thing is certain. Either America, Europe, the Gulf Arabs and the Israelis will forever be condemned to live under the threat of nuclear blackmail (even nuclear war) from a regime the State Department identifies as the world's greatest exporter of terror. Or an imperiled Israel, with its more limited capabilities, will strike Iran — with correspondingly greater probability of failure and of triggering a regional war.

All options are bad. Doing nothing is worse. "The status quo may not prevent some form of war," concludes Cordesman, "and may even be making it more likely."

[Warph]

           

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/314873/obama-s-green-favor-trading-michelle-malkin

"Clean Energy" Is Obama-Speak for Crony Government

By Michelle Malkin
8/24/2012

Breaking news: The Fishwrap of Record has finally discovered that the Obama administration gives its Chicago corporate pals special access to power and regulatory favoritism. On Thursday, The Not-So-New York Times published an A1 story titled "Ties to Obama Aided in Access for Big Utility."

Everyone, put on your shocked faces!

"With energy an increasingly pivotal issue for the Obama White House," the Times intoned, "a review of Exelon's relationship with the administration shows how familiarity has helped foster access at the upper reaches of government and how, in some cases, the outcome has been favorable for Exelon."

You mean Hope and Change was all smoke and mirrors? Well, knock me over with a feather and call me Grandpa Daley!

White House press flack Jay Carney played dumb when asked about the report, which detailed "an unusually large number of meetings with top administration officials at key moments in the consideration of environmental regulations that have been drafted in a way that hurt Exelon's competitors."

"I'm not sure what the issue is, frankly," Carney told the Beltway press corps. Carney, a former Time magazine journalist who pointedly reminded his former media colleagues that he "was a reporter," apparently forgot all the connect-the-dots training he got at his once-hallowed publication.

The issue, dear Carney, is favor-trading and access-peddling. Government for the cronies, by the cronies and of the cronies. The Times spelled it out: "I would like to get some treatment in Washington like that," Ken Anderson, general manager at Tri-State G and T, a Colorado-based power supplier that has been at odds with Exelon over environmental regulations, told the paper. "But Exelon seems to get deference that I can't get."

As I noted back in January in my column on Obama's green robber barons, my scouring of White House visitor logs showed nine visits from Illinois-based Exelon's CEO John Rowe, who met with the president and former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel multiple times. The clean energy company's deep ties had already been illuminated by several other business publications, including Forbes and Crain's.

Frank M. Clark, the veteran lobbyist who runs Exelon's Commonwealth Edison, the largest electric utility in Illinois, is a top Obama adviser and fundraiser dating back to the former community organizer's Illinois State Senate days. Longtime Obama campaign guru David Axelrod worked as a consultant to Exelon. And Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel helped create Exelon -- where he raked in more than $16 million over two years.

Carney's boss once made it a central hobbyhorse of his presidential campaign. When he announced his presidential intentions in 2007, candidate Obama decried "the cynics, the lobbyists, the special interests who've turned our government into a game only they can afford to play." He indignantly singled out "the best bundlers" who get the "greatest access" to power. ComEd's Clark bundled at least $200,000 for Obama in 2008 and at least $100,000 for the 2012 cycle, and forked over nearly $30,000 more to committees supporting Obama. Earlier this year, Obama acknowledged raising at least $74 million through his team of big-time bundlers who have been showered with access, tax dollars and plum patronage positions.

It's taken four years for the media lapdoggies to call out the Naked Emperor of Chicago-on-the-Potomac. Better late than never, ya think? I hear the crackerjack reporters at ye Olde York Times may be planning a special in-depth investigative series on the president's dirty D.C. business-as-usual administration slated to run sometime after Election Day. They could call it "Culture of Corruption: Obama's Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks and Cronies." Oh, wait...

[Warph]

OBUMA PANTS-ON-FIRE - LIES ABOUT TWEETER ACCOUNT

     

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2012/08/obama-has-millions-of-fake-twitter-followers/1

USA Today reported:

President Obama's Twitter account has 18.8 million followers — but more than half of them really don't exist, according to reports.

A new Web tool has determined that 70% of Obama's crowd includes "fake followers,"  The New York Times reports in a story about how Twitter followers can be purchased.

"The practice has become so widespread that StatusPeople, a social media management company in London, released a Web tool last month called the Fake Follower Check that it says can ascertain how many fake followers you and your friends have," the Times reports.

"Fake accounts tend to follow a lot of people but have few followers," said Rob Waller, a founder of StatusPeople. "We then combine that with a few other metrics to confirm the account is fake."
******************************************************************************

Mitt Romney took a swipe at Barack Obama today in his hometown in Michigan:

Mitt Romney:

"I love being home in this place where Ann and I were raised, where both of us were born. Ann was born at Henry Ford hospital, I was born at Harper hospital. No one has ever asked to see my birth certificate. They know that this is the place that we were born and raised."

Of course, the Democrat-media complex is very upset with this joke... Only Obama is allowed to crack birther jokes.

[Warph]

Why an Israeli Strike on Iran Will Happen Before the Election

By Daniel Greenfield
                           

If Israel jets show up in Iranian airspace, it will most likely happen while Obama is too busy accusing Mitt Romney of secretly storing all his money in a giant cave in the Rocky Mountains to do more than dispatch a flunky to chew out Netanyahu over the phone. The election is the perfect window for a strike on Iran's nuclear program, because Team Obama will be too tied down on the Romney Front to do much damage to Israel.

The Obama Administration is interested in somehow making Iran's nuclear capabilities go away in the interests of regional stability. Particularly the regional stability of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar. But the last thing that this form of regional stability needs is Israeli planes flying over Saudi Arabia to take out that nuclear capability.

Just like during the Gulf War, regional stability demands that the United States protect Saudi Arabia and the Gulfies, while keeping Israel out of it. Since Iran's Revolutionary Guard isn't camped out in Kuwait City, protecting them is a matter of posture. The posturing is hollow because everyone knows that Obama is not about to bomb Iran on behalf of Saudi Arabia. He is as likely to bomb Iran for Israel as he is to move to South Carolina and join the NRA. If a third Gulf War is fought, it will be fought for Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, one more time.

In 1988, the United States fought Iran to protect Kuwaiti oil tankers. If oil prices go high enough to potentially cost Obama the election, then he might pry away his foreign policy people from drawing up maps of Syrian targets long enough to actually hit some Iranian naval installations.

None of this has anything to do with Iran's nuclear program... and that's the point. George W. Bush did appear to think that Iranian nuclear weapons might be bad news for the United States. He was nearly unique in that regard. The diplomatic and military establishment is full of experts who view Iranian nuclear weapons purely as factors in the balance of power and utterly refuse to look at them from any other angle. To them, Israel isn't really concerned about a nuclear attack; it's only playing a regional power game.

For Israel, violence is not a posture or a theory. It has few trading connections and no alliances in the region. Its foreign policy has always been about dissipating physical threats to its people, whether through diplomatic or military means. It does not follow this line because it is a saintly state, but because it is a state always on the edge. It has too little territory and too many enemies around it to follow any other path.

Surrounded by countries for which destroying it is a matter of national pride and religious fervor, its only real deterrent is military. Winning several wars won it enough breathing room to try diplomatic solutions. And now the first and last of those diplomatic solutions has failed. It can still count on the military as a deterrent, but there is no deterrent against a nuclear attack carried out by terrorists under plausible deniability. The only remaining deterrent after a nuclear attack is killing as many of those responsible as possible before succumbing to radiation poisoning.

Everyone in the region understands the nature of the countdown. Most of the Sunni Gulfies also privately welcome Israel doing something about Iran's nuclear weapons, even as they redouble their efforts against the Jewish State to avoid allowing their Shiite enemies to benefit ideologically from a confrontation with the Zionist Entity. The rhetoric out of Iran now echoes the rhetoric out of Egypt in the 1960?s. That buildup eventually ended in a preemptive Israeli strike that destroyed Egypt's air force.

But in Washington D.C., the countdown is not a real thing. The received wisdom among the press and the political and diplomatic establishments is that Netanyahu is an obstinate paranoid man who is playing games with them. They don't believe that Israel will do anything about Iran, because they wouldn't do anything about Iran and they assume that Netanyahu is just like them, only more deceptive because he pretends that he will do something about Iran.

It has become fashionable among Western elites to view aggression as either a posture or madness. They have forgotten that sometimes violence isn't a move on an international chessboard or a prelude to a set of political steps. Sometimes it's as simple as one side wanting to kill the other and the other side not wanting to be killed.

In the Middle East ideas that are considered aberrant insanity in the West are commonplace. Killing people is no great big thing. Most regimes do it from time to time to stay in power. Iran dispatched its Islamic militias to kill its own best and brightest in the streets of its capital. Virginity is believed to act as an instant pass to heaven for a woman, so teenage girls sentenced to death must first be forcibly married to their jailers and raped, before being hung.

The very idea that people think this way is incomprehensible in Washington D.C. But the simple question that Israel has to answer is, if this is what the Ayatollahs do to their own daughters, what would they do to those they consider the spawn of pigs and apes?

Israel already knows the answer to that. When Muslim mobs got their hands on Israeli Jews, before or after independence, they tore them to pieces and then sold snapshots of the remains. The policy of targeting all Jews, men, women and children, is not just something that terrorists do because they have no choice, it is the ideological position of Islamist leaders like Yusuf Al-Qaradawi in Egypt or Rashid Al-Ghannushi in Tunisia, and the policy of the Arab countries fighting Israel.

The liberal West has its illusions about the enemy. Israel has little room for those illusions. It will act because it is alone as few other countries on earth are. It will act because it cannot afford to be Poland, Czechoslovakia or Tibet– sacrificed in the great game of nations. It will act because it has no real choice but to act. It will act because for it this is not a set of talking points, a diplomatic program or a regional agenda, it is life or death. It will act, because for all its flaws, its survival is on the line.

That sense of a nation's survival and the life of a people hinging on a single course of action has become an alien one in an insulated world. It is not a thing that Washington D.C or Brussels can take seriously. It is not even a thing that all Israelis take seriously anymore. But those who hear the clock ticking know what is coming. They know the hard choices that will come in the months ahead. And they will make those choices as they made them before, because they will choose to survive.

[Warph]

                  


Why Israel Won't Bomb Iran...

...at least until after U.S. presidential election, Netanyahu won't risk angering Obama

By Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman


In the past year, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, have honed their talent for psychological warfare. At international Holocaust Remembrance Day in January, at the annual AIPAC Policy Conference in March, and in countless interviews, they have created the impression at every opportunity that Israel could strike Iran's nuclear facilities at any moment—and that an attack becomes more likely with each passing day.

Might we wake up one morning between now and November to hear unconfirmed reports of major explosions at Natanz and Fordow, two of Iran's key uranium-enrichment centers? Or will rumors of a strike trickle out, as they did in September 2007, weeks after the Israeli air force destroyed a Syrian nuclear reactor under construction?

No chance.

Although the decision rests in the hands of only two men, and ultimately in Netanyahu's alone, it can be said with confidence that there will be no Israeli military strike on Iran before America's Election Day this year. November 6 may not be literally circled on the calendars of Israel's political and military chiefs, but it might as well be. What makes us so confident?

Officials in the U.S. and Israeli governments told us they believe that President Obama, during private talks at the White House in early March, explicitly requested that Netanyahu not use warplanes or missiles to attack Iran before November. The president may well have used the same words a reporter overheard him saying a few weeks later to his Russian counterpart, Dmitri Medvedev, at a summit in Seoul: "This is my last election," Obama said. "After my election I have more flexibility."

If Netanyahu heeds the president's request, he'll be granting Obama time to win a second term without the crisis of a potential oil disruption and Iranian retaliation that might spook American voters enough to question Obama's foreign-policy credibility.

But will Netanyahu wait? It is no secret that the two leaders do not get along well personally, and the prisms through which they view the Middle East are entirely different. Obama made plain during his first two years in office that he believed the path to progress in the region was by way of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, specifically by halting Israeli settlements and Jewish housing construction in East Jerusalem. Netanyahu, in contrast, warned that Iran is by far the greatest danger confronting the Western world.

The prime minister seems sure that a President Mitt Romney—with whom he's been friends since their days at the Boston Consulting Group in the 1970s—would be supportive of almost anything Israel's government would decide to do. So, why heed Obama's request? The simplest answer, of course, is that Obama may be reelected, and Israel's leader would not want to be branded as the ally who did not cooperate.

There is a more nuanced reality revealed by some Israeli officials who prefer not to be named because their analysis could be seen as undermining Netanyahu-Barak's tough stand. Some in Jerusalem's political world, and many in the Israeli military and the intelligence community, say it is highly unlikely that the Jewish state will strike Iran this year for several sound reasons.

First, they say, there is no great urgency. Iran has continued to enrich uranium, but Israeli intelligence estimates suggest that it would take another year—at least—for Iran to assemble its first bomb, and yet another year to fit it into a missile's warhead.

Second, there is much that Israel can do and is doing, without using its air force and missiles. Israel's intelligence community, led by the Mossad and the even larger military agency Aman, is enjoying an unprecedentedly strong partnership with the CIA and other Western security agencies. While diplomats led by the United States tried to negotiate with Iran in Istanbul, Baghdad, and Moscow this year, Israel and its covert partners continually pressed ahead with sabotage and other subterfuge meant to delay and divert Iran's nuclear program.

We now know that the United States and Israel cooperated on highly sophisticated malware called Stuxnet and Flame—and officials we spoke with add that there is more going on that has not been revealed. Israeli responsibility for a string of assassinations in Tehran, aimed at scientists and engineers who worked in their country's nuclear program, is also barely concealed.

Netanyahu and Barak both have a taste for covert action. They are veterans of an elite and secretive unit of the Israel Defense Forces called Sayeret Matkal that does more than almost anyone can imagine. In the 1970s, Barak was Netanyahu's commander when soldiers in the unit successfully assaulted a hijacked airliner on the tarmac in Tel Aviv, rescued hostages during other terrorist sieges, slipped into Beirut to assassinate Palestinian militants, and infiltrated Syria to kidnap military officers for use in a prisoner swap.

The two men, now weighing one of the most difficult decisions of their political lives, obviously want to stop Iran's nuclear program without a military strike or all-out war. They must wonder whether covert action—including, perhaps, more assassinations, sabotage, supplying Iranians with faulty parts, continuing to disrupt their computer programs, and more—can do enough.

Third, most Israeli military analysts, including those in the Israeli air force, agree that Israel's capabilities are so limited that bombing Iran would only delay its nuclear program, not destroy it. The United States has supplied Israel with 100 GBU-28 bunker-buster bombs in the past six years. But to be much better prepared to strike many targets in Iran, the Israelis want 200 of the improved GBU-31 bombs that have a more precise guidance system. Israel's air force says it also needs two or three KC-135 midair-refueling tanker planes.

Meir Dagan, the former Mossad espionage chief who is waging an almost one-man campaign against an Israeli military strike, warns that a strike would bolster nationalist pride within Iran and spur the Iranians to rebuild and accelerate their nuclear work. Dagan adds that technological knowledge cannot be wiped out by a series of bombing raids. (On the other hand, in the past Israel has been satisfied with the strategy of achieving a multiyear delay in an enemy's threatening strategy. When Prime Minister Menachem Begin sent the air force to bomb Iraq's nuclear reactor in 1981, Israeli intelligence believed that it might derail Saddam Hussein's nuclear project for only two or three years. Still, it was deemed by Israel's leaders to be well worth doing.)

The prime minister and the defense minister are treating Dagan as an enemy, probably because they are annoyed that his public remarks rob them of the strongest tool they posses to command the world's attention. Netanyahu and Barak have been using the threat of an Israeli strike as a lever to push the international community into imposing harsher sanctions against Iran. But now, a respected man such as Dagan, who has only recently stepped out of the shadows, calls the military option "stupid," and other senior figures in military and intelligence agencies are beginning to privately agree with him.

Netanyahu and Barak surely realize the potential dangers stemming from a strike on Iran: Retaliation could include terrorism most anywhere around the globe, a lethal rain of thousands of missiles hitting Israel, and the possibility of an all-out war that could disrupt oil supplies and trigger widespread criticism of Israel.

They also know the dangers of accepting Iran as a nuclear-armed state. Almost without exception, Israeli politicians, military leaders, and intelligence chiefs say that their country cannot tolerate living within a thousand miles of a radical enemy armed with nuclear bombs. There is too much of a chance, they argue, that the Iranians would actually use them; or, at the least, that Iran would be propelled into an unchallengeable role as a regional super-power.

The Iranians may not budge, and a military attack may well happen eventually. But it is far more likely that an American president, either Obama or Romney, will be the one to order attacks aimed at destroying Iran's nuclear facilities after the election. That would be a last resort after exhausting options like covert actions, harsher sanctions, and diplomacy. Whatever their disagreements on tactics, on timing, and on Palestinian issues, U.S. and Israeli leaders are united in their conclusion that the world cannot comfortably live in the shadow of a nuclear-armed Iran.

[Warph]

             

Rahm on Casino: "I Want it For Our Kids"

Source: http://www.nbcchicago.com/blogs/ward-room/Rahm-on-Casino-I-Want-it-For-Our-Kids--167231175.html#ixzz24XWY68Bz

Chicago Boss Rahm Emanuel wants the Casinos for the children... for their schooling, their education, their future.
Oh the humanity...
The altruism tugs at your heart strings.  It makes my eyes water and I think I might throw up.

Is gambling ever not in the hands of  crime?
Ahh, but our politicians don't mind that do they?
No scruples stand in their way.
Financing kids through criminal activity is surely a good idea.

Why , just look how well  gambling and education worked in New Jersey where citizens were told to 'do it for the kids'.
Gambling revenue would pay for all education and taxes would go way down.
Yup.
Worse.. people fell for it!
Yes.. that worked out brilliantly.
But on the bright side, mobsters,  pimps, prostitutes and all manner of flotsam and jetsam have been given work!
Sweet, huh!

Studies show casinos bring serious increase in crime to a city or state.  But, perhaps the schools can teach the children self defense!

According to a report by Beau Yarbrough of the Hesperia Star, a study entitled "Casinos, Crime and Community Costs," looked at all 3,165 counties in the United States from 1977 to 1996.

Its conclusion: Five years after a casino opens, serious crime in the area goes up dramatically when compared to neighboring areas, even after adjusting for economic trends and other factors.

According to the study, five years after a casino opens, robbery in the community goes up 136 percent, aggravated assault is up 91 percent, auto theft is up 78 percent, burglary is up 50 percent, larceny is up 38 percent, rape is up 21 percent and murder is up 12 percent, compared to neighboring communities.

Crime-lowering effects, like additional police and the new jobs represented by a casino are overwhelmed by rising crime increased by the presence of the casino, according to the study.


Wow!  Sounds promising for the kids, huh?