We have one huge difference of opinion (as well as quite a few small ones) with Ann Coulter: she is a Christian, we dislike and oppose all religion.

But we often agree with her on political issues, and we relish her irony for which she has a gift.

She writes:

Earlier this week, Mitt Romney got into trouble for saying, “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.” To comprehend why the political class reacted as if Romney had just praised Hitler, you must understand that his critics live in a world in which no one can ever be fired — a world known as “the government.”  …

Romney’s statement about being able to fire people was an arrow directed straight to the heart of Obamacare. …Talking about insurance providers, he said:

“I want individuals to have their own insurance. That means the insurance company will have an incentive to keep you healthy. It also means if you don’t like what they do, you can fire them. I like being able to fire people who provide services to me. You know, if someone doesn’t give me a good service that I need, I want to say I’m going to go get someone else to provide that service to me.”

Obamacare, you will recall, will be administered by the same people who run the Department of Motor Vehicles. They will operate under the same self-paced, self-evaluated work rules that have made government offices the envy of efficiency specialists everywhere.

And no one will be able to fire them — unless they’re caught doing something truly vile and criminal, such as stealing from patients in nursing homes.

Oops, I take that back: Government employees who rob the elderly also can’t be fired.

The Los Angeles Times recently reported that, after a spate of burglaries at a veterans hospital in California several years ago, authorities set up video cameras to catch the perpetrators. In short order, nurse’s aide Linda Riccitelli was videotaped sneaking into the room of 93-year-old Raymond Germain as he slept, sticking her hand into his dresser drawer and stealing the bait money that had been left there. Riccitelli was fired and a burglary prosecution initiated. A few years later, the California Personnel Board rescinded her firing and awarded her three-years back pay. The board dismissed the videotape of Riccitelli stealing the money as “circumstantial.” …

But surely we’ll be able to fire a government employee who commits a physical assault on a mentally disturbed patient? No, wrong again.

Psychiatric technician Gregory Powell was working at a government center for the mentally retarded when he hit a severely disturbed individual with a shoe so hard that the impression of the shoe’s sole was visible on the victim three hours later. A psychologist who witnessed the attack said the patient was cowering on the couch before being struck. Powell was fired, but, again, the California Personnel Board ordered him rehired.

Now, let’s turn to New York City and look for any clues about why it might be the highest-taxed city in the nation.

For years, the New York City school budget included $35 million to $65 million a year to place hundreds of teachers in “rubber rooms,” after they had committed such serious offenses that they were barred from classrooms. Teachers accused of raping students sat in rooms doing no work all day, still collecting government paychecks because they couldn’t be fired.

After an uproar over the rubber rooms a few years ago, Michael Bloomberg got rid of the rooms. But the teachers still can’t be fired.

Wherever there is government, there is malfeasance and criminality — and government employees who can never be fired.

In 2010, 33 employees of the Securities and Exchange Commission — half making $100,000 to $200,000 per year — were found to have spent most of their workdays downloading Internet pornography over a five-year period. (Thank goodness there were no financial shenanigans going on then, so the SEC guys had plenty of time on their hands.) One, a senior lawyer at SEC headquarters in Washington, D.C., admitted to spending eight hours a day looking at Internet pornography, sometimes even “working” through his lunch hour. Another admitted watching up to five hours a day of pornography in his office. …  Not one of the porn-surfing employees of the SEC was fired.

In 2009, the inspector general of the National Science Foundation was forced to abandon an investigation of grant fraud when he stumbled across dozens of NSF employees, including senior management, surfing pornographic websites on government computers during working hours. A senior official who had spent 331 workdays talking to fully or partially nude women online was allowed to resign (but was not fired). I hope they gave him his computer as a parting gift.

The others kept their jobs — including an NSF employee who had downloaded hundreds of pornographic videos and pictures and even developed pornographic PowerPoint slide shows. (And you thought PowerPoint presentations were always boring.) …

These are the people who are going to be controlling your access to medical services if Obamacare isn’t repealed. There will be only one insurance provider, and you won’t be able to switch, even if the service is lousy (and it will be). 

Obamacare employees will spend their days surfing pornography, instead of approving your heart operation. They can steal from you and even physically assault you. And they can never be fired. 

That’s one gargantuan difference with “Romneycare” right there: If you don’t like what your insurer is doing in Massachusetts, you can get a new one.

Nothing much to quarrel with there. Only we don’t think there’s anything to be said for “Romneycare” or any government-run medical services, actual or conceivable.

America is confronted with an existential choice. If it can no longer afford both strong defense and social welfare – which seems to be the case ever more compellingly – which will it choose? A strong defense ensures survival. Welfare guarantees decline and fall.

Earlier this month, Obama announced his plan for weakening America.

We quote from an article by Arnold Ahlert at Front Page:

The scope of the divestment is daunting. The additional $500 billion in new spending cuts come on top of the $480 billion this president cut out of the military budget his first three years in office. Neither of these cuts reflect the possibility that an additional $500 billion in possible cuts will kick in next January, under “sequestration.” And since the 2012 budget request already calls for the reduction of 27,000 soldiers and 20,000 Marines over the next four years, it is likely those numbers will increase as well.

Critical technology has also [been targeted and], may get axed as well. The Airborne Laser, a project aimed at destroying enemy missiles soon after they blast off was killed 2010, along with the Future Combat Systems, a program deigned to coordinate mobile forces and unmanned vehicles. The latter was killed with the promise that modernization resources would go directly to the Army and Marines. So far it hasn’t happened, and now it may not. The Navy’s hypersonic electromagnetic rail gun, a project designed to intercept anti-ship missiles–like those that could be aimed at our carriers in a fight with Iran or China–lost funding in 2011. Cutbacks could also include the F-35 fighter plane, despite its radar-evading stealth technology that would allow us to maintain our dominance in the air.

Why? Incredibly, the president claimed “the tide of war is receding.” No doubt that would be news to Iraqis who are enduring large-scale attacks and the possibility of a civil war, due primarily to our premature withdrawal. So too for the Afghans, who must now contemplate the return of the Taliban, with whom the Obama administration has seen fit to negotiate, using Islamic cleric Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi as a “key mediator,” despite [no, because of  – JB] rabid anti-Semitism and his issuance of a fatwa urging the killing of American troops. No doubt Iran, fresh from conducting military exercises in the Strait of Hormuz last week, and further maneuvers near the Afghan coast on Saturday, would be equally surprised. And then there’s the multiple threats the Islamist uprisings, nostalgically referred to as the “Arab Spring,” have the potential to engender as well.

[The] administration [is] projecting military budget outlays of 2.7 percent of GDP by 2021. That number is comparable to our military outlays in the year 1940–one year before America’s fatal flirtation with both isolationism and peace literally blew up in our collective faces at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

As always, this chain saw approach to the military is what every military cutback has been about for progressives: maintaining the inviolability of the welfare state, for which spending is set to hit nearly 11% of GDP by 2020, before the projected $2.6 trillion slated for ObamaCare – a number that will undoubtedly rise – is factored in. Yet this is where that inviolability inevitably leads:

“Entitlements now account for around 65 percent of all federal spending and a record 18 percent of GDP. The three largest entitlements – Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid – eclipsed defense spending in 1976 and have been growing ever since. If future taxes are held at the historical average, these three entitlements will consume all tax revenues by 2052, leaving no money for the government’s primary constitutional obligation: providing for the common defense.”

Yet it is more than just a desire to expand the welfare state that drives this president and his administration. Mr. Obama is a dedicated progressive who cannot hide his disdain for American exceptionalism. The Hoover Institution’s Shelby Steele explains:

“[The American left] seeks to trade the burdens of greatness for the relief of mediocrity. When greatness fades, when a nation contracts to a middling place in the world, then the world in fact no longer knocks on its door… To redeem the nation from its supposed avarice and hubris, the American left effectively makes a virtue of decline  …”

How far is Mr. Obama willing to go in that regard? His administration recently acknowledged that it is pursuing a policy aimed at giving Russia detailed information about the performance of our offensive and defensive missile capabilities. Ostensibly this will be instrumental in breaking the deadlock in missile defense talks with Moscow, in that it will assure the Russians we mean them no harm. Yet section 1227 of the defense law prohibits spending on such a measure, until Congress receives a report on the numerous details involved. Furthermore, the president is required to certify to Congress that Russia will not share the secrets with other nations, or “develop counter-measures” to U.S. defenses. [Trust thine enemy?}

[But] Mr. Obama kicked section 1227 to the curb. In a signing statement, he said he considered the restrictions “non-binding.” …

Are Americans willing to completely abandon this nation’s role as the “last best hope of mankind” for a welfare state that will consume 100 percent of government revenue forty years hence?

For those who can’t work out in theory that the welfare state is unsustainable – to use one of the favorite words of the left  – there is the model of Europe to prove it, as one after another the socialist heavens come crashing down.

We would like to see all entitlements abandoned. Let’s have very low taxes instead, allotting the government enough revenue to maintain an extremely strong defense capability and a reliable justice system so that the only necessary function of government, the defense of the nation’s liberty, is thoroughly fulfilled;  allowing it nothing to squander on frivolous and counter-productive extravagances such as welfare and foreign aid.

We expect this opinion of ours will provoke the usual question: if the government stops being the welfare-provider for the nation, how will those who cannot support themselves survive? The answer: on the munificent charity that those who ask the question will not hesitate to provide.

Has it ever happened before? Is there any historical precedent for it?

A country in a time of war elects as its leader a passionate devotee of the enemy’s cause.

No, surely that’s a plot too far. Strains credulity. Let’s try another approach.

If an elected US leader wanted to further the cause of the international Left: the destruction of America as a free, prosperous, capitalist, powerful, rule-of-law democratic country – what would he do?

Let’s assume he got there – to his leadership position as president of the United States – as a result of a process that had been doggedly pursued by the Left through almost all the years of his life: “the long march through the institutions”, as first proposed in Europe by the New Left revolutionaries.

Plots and conspiracies seldom work but this one did. It succeeded better perhaps than any of the Sixty-Eighters, on either side of the Atlantic, had dared to hope. Slowly but steadily the New Left revolutionaries infiltrated the trade unions, the schools, the universities, the media, local government, and – the crowning triumph in Europe – central government. Those institutions which they couldn’t dominate and turn, they denigrated and demoralized into submission: police forces and the military.

Let’s say that last of all (but who, even among the most imaginative optimists, could have predicted that it would happen in just 40 years since the plot was hatched?) the US presidency, the most powerful position any one person can attain to, fell to the Long Marchers. What would the man do when he found himself on that eminence, with the levers of power in his hands? What steps would he take to realize the objective – the destruction of free, prosperous, capitalist, powerful, rule-of-law democratic America? 

We surmise:

• He would deny that Islam is at war with the West or even a threat to it. He would try to propitiate Iran, and do nothing effective to stop it becoming nuclear armed. He would cultivate close relations with the powers of the Islamic world: Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the Muslim Brotherhood. He would bring Islamic advisers into the White House and every government department. He would do everything he possibly could to weaken Islam’s bette noire, Israel. He would forbid the word “terrorist” to be associated with the word “Islam” by anyone in his administration. In wars he inherited from his predecessor, he would impose severely restrictive rules of engagement on American soldiers, and withdraw them altogether under conditions amounting in effect to American surrender. He would try to prevent military trials of enemy captives, and find pretexts for releasing them.
• He would cut the US defense budget, sell arms to the jihadist powers, concede as much as he could to the Russians to boost their military power.
• He would forbid the testing of new nuclear weapons.
• He would stop research and development of military space technology.
• He would wreck the economy by plunging the country into deep debt, redistributing wealth through high taxation and increased entitlements such as national health care, and stir up class conflict.
• He would hamper business by imposing thousands of regulations on it.
• He would prevent the domestic development of cheap energy, and devote billions of tax-payer’s money to the making of electricity out of moonbeams.
• He would diminish the sovereignty of the nation by implementing United Nations decrees, including limitation on free speech in order to protect Islam from criticism, and prohibiting the private ownership of handguns.
• He would appoint a constellation of czars as his personal advisers to implement his radical policies.
• He would govern by issuing administrative regulations, so imposing his will directly, bypassing Congress.

As we don’t share his aims  – in fact, are appalled by them – we cannot think of all the things he might do to change America into a leftist, Islam-friendly, authoritarian state, but he can.

And he’s doing them.

It is our contention that Christianity brought a thousand years of darkness down on Europe. It extinguished the bright light of classical culture, of which Socratean doubt, the need to examine all ideas critically, was the enlightening principle. Christianity claimed a monopoly of truth, and the  totalitarian-minded Catholic Church did its utmost to suppress dissent by the cruelest means imaginable. So did Protestant churches as far as they could reach. Like Communism and all ideological orthodoxies, Christianity feared open criticism, recognizing that it’s power could not survive argument. The Enlightenment proved that to be the case; a great upwelling of doubt, criticism, exploration and discovery, it loosened the grip of theocratic tyranny, dispersed the darkness of superstition, and let Europe flower again after a long and terrible night. Science flourished once more, achieving an immense extension of knowledge and giving birth to new technologies. The might of the West is rooted in the Greco-Roman culture revived in the Enlightenment, not in a “Judeo-Christian tradition”.

Now darkness is descending again on the West. Islam, a tyranny of the mind as cruel as Christianity and even more intolerant, an ideology from the Dark Ages that forbids criticism and kills critics, is spreading rapidly through Europe and America, zealously assisted by Western governments and passionately defended by the intelligentsia of the political left – which on principle favors ideological conformity and its totalitarian enforcement.

This is from the Stonegate Institute, by Soeren Kern:

The European Union has offered to host the next meeting of the so-called Istanbul Process, an aggressive effort by Muslim countries to make it an international crime to criticize Islam.

The announcement comes less than one month after the United States hosted its own Istanbul Process conference in Washington, DC.

The Istanbul Process – its explicit aim is to enshrine in international law a global ban on all critical scrutiny of Islam and/or Islamic Sharia law – is being spearheaded by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a bloc of 57 Muslim countries.

Based in Saudi Arabia, the OIC has long pressed the European Union and the United States to impose limits on free speech and expression about Islam.

But the OIC has now redoubled its efforts and is engaged in a determined diplomatic offensive to persuade Western democracies to implement United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC) Resolution 16/18, which calls on all countries to combat “intolerance, negative stereotyping and stigmatization of … religion and belief.” (Analysis of the OIC’s war on free speech can be found here and here.)

Resolution 16/18, which was adopted at HRC headquarters in Geneva in March 2011, is widely viewed as a significant step forward in OIC efforts to advance the international legal concept of defaming Islam.

However, the HRC resolution – as well as the OIC-sponsored Resolution 66/167, which was quietly approved by the 193-member UN General Assembly on December 19, 2011 – remains ineffectual as long as it lacks strong support in the West.

The OIC therefore scored a diplomatic coup when the Obama Administration agreed to host a three-day Istanbul Process conference in Washington, DC on December 12-14, 2011. In doing so, the United States gave the OIC the political legitimacy it has been seeking to globalize its initiative to ban criticism of Islam.

Following the Obama Administration’s lead, the European Union now wants to get in on the action by hosting the next Istanbul Process summit, tentatively scheduled for July 2012.

Up until now, the European Union has kept the OIC initiative at arms-length. But Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, Secretary-General of the OIC, says the EU’s offer to host the meeting represents a “qualitative shift in action against the phenomenon of Islamophobia,” according to the International Islamic News Agency (IINA), the OIC’s official news/propaganda organ.

According to the IINA, “The phenomenon of Islamophobia is found in the West in general, but is growing in European countries in particular and in a manner different than that in the US, which had contributed to drafting Resolution 16/18. The new European position represents the beginning of the shift from their previous reserve over the years over the attempts by the OIC to counter ‘defamation of religions’ in the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly of the United Nations. …

Europe is retreating from the Enlightenment. But not without  protest.

The OIC is especially angry over its inability to silence a growing number of democratically elected politicians in Europe who have voiced concerns over the refusal of Muslim immigrants to integrate into their host countries and the consequent establishment of parallel Islamic societies in many parts of Europe.

According to the IINA, “Ihsanoglu said that the growing role of the extreme right in politics in several European countries has become stronger than the capacity of the Organization [OIC], explaining that the extreme right, who [sic] hates Muslims, became leverage in the hands of politicians. He added that the rise of the extreme right through elections has become an issue that cannot be countered, considering the democratic way in which these extremists reach their positions. He pointed out to the referendum held in Switzerland, as an example, which resulted in suspending the construction of minarets there following a vote by the Swiss people.”

In other words, the OIC is now seeking the support of non-elected bureaucrats at the headquarters of the European Union in Brussels to enact pan-European hate speech legislation to limit by fiat what 500 million European citizens – including democratically elected politicians – can and cannot say about Islam.

To be sure, many individual European countries that lack First Amendment protections like those in the United States have already enacted hate speech laws that effectively serve as proxies for the all-encompassing blasphemy legislation the OIC is seeking to impose on the European Union as a whole.

The author lists a dozen examples of Europeans who have dared to raise their voices to criticize the barbarous ideology of Islam and defend their own culture, only to be prosecuted and punished for it under recently enacted, bad and stupid laws. Among them, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff and Geert Wilders, whose cases we have discussed in our posts: The West on trial (December 16, 2009); Freedom versus Islam (January 20, 2010); Civilization on trial (October 11,2010); An honest confession of hypocrisy (October 23, 2010);The new heresy (January 11, 2011); Darkness descending – again (February 7, 2011); Sharia is the law in Austria (December 25, 2011); Only the gagged may speak freely (December 26/11).

Almost everywhere in Europe now, “speaking the truth about Islam is subject to swift and hefty legal penalties” as the author says.

Why should any religion be exempt from criticism? Religious ideas above all need to be criticized, being the most irrational and the most oppressive. And even more than other religions, Islam needs to be dragged into the sunlight. It is the only intolerant religion of our time –  and it is asking to be protected from intolerance!

Right now, when Islam is intent on conquering the West by all possible means including terrorism, it is especially necessary to be Islamophobic.

Americans must resist the Obama administration’s efforts to help the OIC drive our world back into darkness. At least in the United States – the great product and political embodiment of the Enlightenment – the light of liberty must be kept burning.

Wednesday night, the Iranian parliament began drafting a bill prohibiting foreign warships from entering the Gulf without Tehran’s permission. …  Saudi Arabia has warned the Obama administration that Iranian leaders mean what they say; their leaders are bent on provoking a military clash with the United States at a time and place of their choosing, rather than leaving the initiative to Washington. To this end, Iranian officials are ratcheting up their belligerence day after day.

If this report is accurate, either Iran is eager to be at war with the United States, or the mullahs do not believe that anything they do will put them in danger of military retaliation by the Obama administration:

The armies of Saudi Arabia and fellow Gulf Cooperation Council states stood ready Thursday Jan. 5, for Washington to stand up to Iranian threats and send an aircraft carrier or several warships through the Strait of Hormuz into the Persian Gulf. Riyadh has been leaning hard on the Obama administration not to let Tehran get away with its warning to react with “full force” if the USS Stennis aircraft carrier tried to reenter the Gulf or Iran’s pretensions to control the traffic transiting the world’s most important oil route. …

America’s failure to rise to Iran’s challenge will confirm its rulers in the conviction that the US is a paper tiger and encourage them to press their advantage for new gains.

The assessment of British military experts was that the question now is: Who will blink first? Will the US follow through on the Pentagon’s assertion that the deployment of US military assets in the Persian Gulf will continue as it has for decades? Or will Iran act on its warnings and block those waters to the entry of American warships?

President Barack Obama can’t afford to cave in to Iran, especially while campaigning for reelection in Nov. 2012; Tehran, for its part, has made too many threats to easily back down. The entire region is now on tenterhooks for the next move, with US, Iranian and Gulf armies on the highest war alert. American and Iranian war planners both accept that their advantage lies in surprising the enemy – without, however, catapulting the Persian Gulf into a full-dress war.

In anarchic Libya, militias are engaged in a power struggle with each other. In Egypt the religious parties are engaged in a power struggle with the military. To what extent, we wonder, is the “Arab Spring” a struggle between those who want to enter the modern world as shaped by the West and those who want to remain in the unchanging darkness of the Islamic past?

We think that if Iran were hit so hard now that all its nuclear and military installations were incapacitated  –  by Israel or the United States, better still by both acting together – not only would the threat of nuclear attack from that belligerent country be averted, but the strike would send a shock wave through every Islamic state, every mosque, every terrorist group, and the heart of every West-hating Muslim. It could halt, or at the very least strongly discourage, every form of jihad, violent or stealthy, open or insidious.

The Muslim world would stand appalled.

It would be the victory for civilization that civilization urgently needs.

Is Obama – the pro-Islam weakling in charge of the American giant – likely to hit Iran? Not willingly. But maybe force majeure is about to move him too.

Obama has brought America to abject defeat.

He is entreating a vicious Muslim cleric, acclaimed as a spokesman for Islam, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, to negotiate with the Taliban for the United States’ terms of surrender.  

In choosing such an envoy, he is begging the savage Taliban to let the United States of America save face in a pretense of mutually desired peace-making.  

Andrew McCarthy writes at the National Review Online:

Al-Qaradawi is the most influential Sunni Islamist in the world, thanks to such ventures as his al-Jazeera TV program (Sharia and Life) …

In 2003, he issued a fatwa calling for the killing of American troops in Iraq. …[He champions] Hamas, mass-murder attacks, and suicide bombings… [urges]  the destruction of Israel, rebuking clerics who dare counsel against killing civilians. …

After thousands of young Americans have laid down their lives to protect the United States from jihadist terror, President Obama apparently seeks to end the war by asking Qaradawi, a jihad-stoking enemy of the United States, to help him strike a deal that will install our Taliban enemies as part of the sharia state we have been building in Afghanistan. …

The price tag will include the release of Taliban prisoners from Gitmo …

The administration will also agree to the lifting of U.N. sanctions against the Taliban, and recognition of the Taliban as a legitimate political party (yes, just like the Muslim Brotherhood!).

In return, the Taliban will pretend to forswear violence, to sever ties with al-Qaeda, and to cooperate with the rival Karzai regime.

It would mark one of the most shameful chapters in American history.

Correction: What the President of the United States has done and is doing to advance the Islamic jihad is the most shameful chapter in American history.

Daniel Greenfield writes at Canada Free Press:

The news that the Obama Administration has brought in genocidal Muslim Brotherhood honcho Yusuf Al-Qaradawi to discuss terms of surrender for the transfer of Afghanistan to the Taliban caps a year in which the Brotherhood and the Salafists are looking up carve up Egypt, the Islamists won Tunisia’s elections, Turkey’s Islamist AKP Party purged the last bastions of the secular opposition and Libya’s future as an Islamist state was secured by American, British and French jets and special forces. …

In 2010, the Taliban were still hiding in caves. In 2012 they are set to be in power from Tunisia to Afghanistan and from Egypt to Yemen. …

2011 will be remembered [as] a pivotal year in the rise of the next Caliphate. …

If [Obama] really had no interest in winning Afghanistan … why did we stay for so long and lose so many lives fighting a war that the White House had no intention of winning? The ugly conclusion that must be drawn from the timing of the Iraq and Afghanistan withdrawals is that the wars were being played out to draw down around the time of the next election.

We don’t believe that any sort of victory is now possible in Afghanistan. We argue that the US should have pulled out of Afghanistan after it whacked the Taliban out of power. Staying “to build democracy” was a stupid mistake. Withdrawal now should be carried out with serious warnings that if the Taliban come back to power they will be whacked again. But we agree with the writer’s point about the timing of withdrawal.

What that means is Obama sacrificed the thousands of Americans killed and wounded in the conflict as an election strategy. The idea that American soldiers were fighting and dying for no reason until the time when maximum political advantage could be gained from pulling them out is horrifying, it’s a crime beyond redemption, an act worse than treason — and yet there is no other rational conclusion to be drawn from the timetable.

Isn’t it treason itself? And what could be worse than that the leader of the United States should commit treason against his country?

If the Taliban were not our enemy …

– as unintelligent and ill-informed Vice-President Joe Biden recently said was the case –

… then the war should have ended shortly after the election. Instead Obama threw more soldiers into the mix while tying their hands with Rules of Engagement that prevented them from defending themselves or aggressively going after the Taliban. Casualties among US soldiers and Afghan civilians increased. … Now … we are negotiating a withdrawal.

There are only two possible explanations. Either we lost the war or Obama never intended to win it and was allowing the Taliban to murder American soldiers until the next election. If so we’re not just looking at a bad man at the teleprompter, we are looking into the face of an evil so amoral [immoral, we’d say – JB] that it defies description. …

But wait, there is more.

Iraq will likely fall to Iran in a bloody civil war, whether it will be parts of the country or the whole country depend on how much support we provide to the Kurds. Under the Obama Administration the level of support is likely to be none.

Once the Islamists firmly take power across North Africa they will begin squeezing the last states that have still not fallen. Last month the leader of the murderous Enhada Islamists who have taken power in Tunisia stopped by Algeria. Morocco has not yet come down, but at this rate it’s only a matter of time.

Syria remains an open question. The Muslim Brotherhood is in a successor position there and would welcome our intervention against the Assad regime. The Assads are no prize and they’re Iranian puppets, but shoving them out would give the Brotherhood yet another country and its sizable collection of weaponry.

All that is bound to make 2012 an ugly year in its own right, especially if the Obama Administration continues allowing the Muslim Brotherhood to control its foreign policy. … The region has become an indisputably worse place this year with the majority of moderate governments overthrown and replaced, or in the process of being replaced by Islamist thugs. …

Yemen too may be taken over by jihadists according to the Washington Post:

With pro-democracy demonstrators now in the 11th month of a populist uprising that has forced President Ali Abdullah Saleh to agree to step down, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and its sympathizers have taken full advantage of the turbulence.

In May, they overran large swaths of Abyan province, including this regional capital. Today, they rule over significant territory in this strategic region, near important oil shipping lanes.

[Their] stated goal is to create an Islamic emirate in Yemen, which American officials fear could be used as a base to plan more attacks against the United States.

The Iranian regime closed the Straits of Hormuz for five hours yesterday to demonstrate how easily they could do it. Obama shows no inclination to force that bellicose Islamic state to stop building a nuclear arsenal.

While in Europe Islam is steadily achieving power by demanding  and being granted the establishment of sharia law, inside the United States it has advanced its influence by leaps and bounds under the protection and with the active encouragement of the Obama administration.

Worse than that. There is plainly a fixed intention by Obama personally to give victory to Islam. His support of the Muslim Brotherhood is an indication of it. His surrender to the Taliban is proof of it. 

Mark Steyn predicts an unhappy New Year.

Everything he warns about is real, but he writes about it so engagingly that he waltzes with our minds rather than rubs our noses in the messy facts.

Ring out the new, ring in the old. No, hang on, that should be the other way around, shouldn’t it?

Not as far as 2011 was concerned. The year began with a tea-powered Republican caucus taking control of the House of Representatives and pledging to rein in spendaholic government. It ended with President Obama making a pro forma request for a mere $1.2 trillion increase in the debt ceiling. This will raise government debt to $16.4 trillion — a new world record! If only until he demands the next debt-ceiling increase in three months’ time.

At the end of 2011 … tens of millions of Americans remain unaware that this nation is broke — broker than any nation has ever been.

A few days before Christmas, we sailed across the psychological Rubicon and joined the club of nations whose government debt now exceeds their total GDP. It barely raised a murmur — and those who took the trouble to address the issue noted complacently that our 100% debt-to-GDP ratio is a mere two-thirds of Greece’s.

That’s true, but at a certain point per capita comparisons are less relevant than the sheer hard dollar sums: Greece owes a few rinky-dink billions; America owes more money than anyone has ever owed anybody ever.

Public debt has increased by 67% over the last three years, and too many Americans refuse even to see it as a problem. For most of us, “$16.4 trillion” has no real meaning, any more than “$17.9 trillion” or “$28.3 trillion” or “$147.8 bazillion.” It doesn’t even have much meaning for the guys spending the dough.

Look into the eyes of Barack Obama or Harry Reid or Barney Frank …

Please no!

… and you realize that, even as they’re borrowing all this money, they have no serious intention of paying any of it back. That’s to say, there is no politically plausible scenario under which the $16.4 trillion is reduced to $13.7 trillion, and then $7.9 trillion, and eventually 173 dollars and 48 cents.

At the deepest levels within our governing structures, we are committed to living beyond our means on a scale no civilization has ever done. Our most enlightened citizens think it’s rather vulgar and boorish to obsess about debt. The urbane, educated, Western progressive would rather “save the planet,” a cause which offers the grandiose narcissism that, say, reforming Medicare lacks.

So, for example, a pipeline delivering Canadian energy from Alberta to Texas is blocked by the president on no grounds whatsoever except that the very thought of it is an aesthetic affront to the moneyed Sierra Club types who infest his fundraisers.

The offending energy, of course, does not simply get mothballed in the Canadian attic: The Dominion’s prime minister has already pointed out that Canada will sell it to the Chinese, whose politburo lacks our exquisitely refined revulsion at economic dynamism, and indeed seems increasingly amused by it. Pace the ecopalyptics, the planet will be just fine: Would it kill you to try saving your country, or state, or municipality?

The “ecopalyptics”: a coinage that should go into general circulation.

Last January, the BBC’s Brian Milligan inaugurated the New Year by driving an electric Mini from London to Edinburgh, taking advantage of the many government-subsidized charge posts en route. It took him four days, which works out to an average speed of 6 mph — or longer than it would have taken on a stagecoach in the mid-19th century. This was hailed as a great triumph by the environmentalists. I mean, c’mon, what’s the hurry?

What indeed? In September, the 10th anniversary of a murderous strike at the heart of America’s most glittering city was commemorated at a building site: The Empire State Building was finished in 18 months during the Depression, but in the 21st century the global superpower cannot put up two replacement skyscrapers within a decade.

The 9/11 memorial museum was supposed to open on the 11th anniversary, this coming September. On Thursday, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced there is “no chance of it being open on time.” No big deal. What’s one more endlessly delayed, inefficient, over-bureaucratized construction project in a sclerotic republic?

Barely had the 9/11 observances ended than America’s gilded if somewhat long-in-the-tooth youth took to the streets of Lower Manhattan to launch “Occupy Wall Street.” The young certainly should be mad about something. After all, it’s their future that got looted to bribe the present.

As things stand, they’ll end their days in an impoverished, violent, disease-ridden swamp of dysfunction that would be all but unrecognizable to Americans of the mid-20th century — and, if that’s not reason to take to the streets, what is?

Alas, our somnolent youth are also laboring under the misapprehension that advanced Western societies still have somebody to stick it to. The total combined wealth of the Forbes 400 richest Americans is $1.5 trillion. So, if you confiscated the lot, it would barely cover one Obama debt-ceiling increase.

Nevertheless, America’s student princes’ main demand was that someone else should pick up the six-figure tab for their leisurely half-decade varsity of social justice studies. Lest sticking it to the Man by demanding the Man write them a large check sound insufficiently idealistic, they also wanted a trillion dollars for “ecological restoration.”

Hey, why not? What difference is another lousy trill gonna make?

Underneath the patchouli and pneumatic drumming, the starry-eyed young share the same cobwebbed parochial assumptions of permanence as their grandparents: We’re gayer, greener and groovier, but other than that it’s still 1950 and we’ve got more money than anybody else on the planet, so why get hung up about a few trillion here and a few trillion there?

In a mere half-century, the richest nation on earth became the brokest nation in history, but the attitudes and assumptions of half the population and 90% of the ruling class remain unchanged. …

At this stage in a critical election cycle, we ought to be arguing about how many government departments to close, how many government programs to end, how many millions of government regulations to do away with. Instead, one party remains committed to encrusting even more barnacles to America’s rusting hulk, while the other is far too wary of harshing the electorate’s mellow.

“Harshing the mellow”. Only Mark Steyn could write that.

The sooner we recognize the 20th century entitlement state is over, the sooner we can ring in something new. The longer we delay ringing out the old, the worse it will be. Happy New Year?

Individuals find their happiness – if they find it – in their private lives. “Public affairs  vex no man,” said the great Dr. Samuel Johnson.

The trouble is, a wrecked economy affects private lives by reducing the chances for happiness.

But may we all still pursue it. The Declaration of Independence says it’s our right to do so. And if we can get rid of the collectivist-minded Obama and his henchmen and henchwomen, maybe we’ll catch it eventually in a bright new year.

Will the United Nations pause in its continual condemnation of Israel for daring to exist, and say a word or two against the enslavement of children by Arabs?

We all know the answer to that question.

Will the US State Department censure the practice?

We know the answer to that one too.

This is by Stephen Brown from Front Page:

It is perhaps the most pernicious of evils. The words “child slavery” would cause most people nowadays to recoil in horror, but in the oil-rich countries of the Saudi Arabian Peninsula, it apparently still doesn’t.

There are … many … parents among Pakistan’s large, poverty-stricken population willing to sell their male offspring into the Persian Gulf. Boys as young as three are bought from poor parents, and sometimes simply kidnapped from the street, principally in Pakistan and Bangladesh, and sent as slaves to these oil-rich states for one purpose only: to win camel races for their new Arab masters. The boys are expected to do this after being trained as riders under very brutal conditions for what is a very popular sport in that region. …

The unfortunate boys kept on an “ousbah,” an isolated camel farm, are caught up in a nightmare of hellish proportions. After experiencing the trauma of suddenly being separated from their families, they are made to work 18-hour days. A camel jockey-in-training is also starved, beaten and sometimes sexually abused. Serious injury, even death, is a fate that also awaits many of the child riders, some as young as five, when training or racing over distances between four and 10 kilometres atop of 800-900 pound animals that can run as fast as 40 miles per hour. Even if the rider does not fall, damaged genitals is one of the serious wounds the slave boys often suffer. …

Along with the boys, young girls from South Asia and other impoverished countries are also trafficked to the Arabian Peninsula but for sexual exploitation. …Traffickers have also sometimes been taught at Third World airports leaving for the Arabian Peninsula with their human cargo. In 2007, one was caught in Karachi with both a boy and a young, pregnant woman. He was headed for Oman where he planned to sell the boy as a camel jockey and the girl as a sex slave. Her unborn baby was also destined to become a camel jockey or a sex slave, according to Pakistani police, who claim pregnant women are being trafficked for the purpose of producing future slaves. …

Unfortunately for its innocent victims, both present and future, the eradication of slavery on the Arabian Peninsula will be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. It is an ingrained, centuries-old institution. … Under sharia law, which governs Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, Muslims are legally allowed to own slaves. … Another reason for this inhuman sense of entitlement is that the prophet Muhammad was also a slave owner, setting the example for the fundamentalists. …

Perhaps the greatest obstacle to abolishing slavery in places like the Arabian Peninsula and Mauritania is the mindset. In these countries, enslaving non-Arab human beings, including children, is simply viewed as the natural order of things. …

Victims of child slavery also cannot look to the United Nations Human Rights Council for help. It contains despots and tyrants whose human rights records are just as bad as Mauritania’s and Saudi Arabia’s, as well as Islamic countries that bribe them and may be practising slavery themselves.

There is a UN agency that ostensibly exists to prevent the exploitation of human beings: the International Labor Organization (ILO).

The ILO does nothing to save little boys and young girls from Arab enslavement.

Arabs are never to be offended by any UN interference in their affairs. Islam is never to be offended by any criticism whatsoever.

That being its policy  – unofficial but fully implemented – the UN is not only the protector of slave owners and traffickers, it is collaborating with them. By permitting slavery, it encourages it.  

The UN must be destroyed.

Oh-oh, czar of fraud and czar of blight,

Czar of lies as black as night!

Why would Obama want to appoint a political ally to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics?

An unsurprising explanation comes from PJ Media, by Richard Pollock:

On the eve of the 2012 election, the White House is pushing to politicize the impartial U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The administration is also trying to bypass the congressional oversight that protects the independence of the neutral agency.

The BLS is the nation’s premier nonpartisan statistical agency reporting on the state of the American labor market. For more than a century, both political parties have considered BLS to be independent and politically untouchable.

The BLS monthly unemployment data is a key factor contributing to the president’s unpopularity.

Over the last year, the administration has refused to fill the two top BLS positions. …

The labor secretary and deputy secretary … made it clear that they wanted someone of their choosing from outside the existing career cadre. …

This has led to speculation that the White House is trying to circumvent the Senate so as to appoint a deputy whose position does not need Senate confirmation, and who would defer to the White House and to politically aggressive Labor Secretary Hilda Solis.

One source told PJ Media the president would like to install Betsey Stevenson as the deputy commissioner. Stevenson is a Princeton academic and loyal political ally who worked as chief economist for Solis. Stevenson would be rejected by many in the Senate, which has regarded political allies as inappropriate for running the nonpartisan BLS.

Although the meddling with the BLS has received little coverage, economists and Republicans in Congress are decrying the effort. Diana Furchtgott-Roth, former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor under the Bush administration, called the administration’s tactics “outrageous.” She told PJ Media that meddling with the BLS personnel process could be a prelude to eventual tampering with unemployment surveys and results. …

In a November 29 letter to Secretary Solis, Senator Michael Enzi (R-WY) — ranking Republican on the Senate Labor Committee — expressed alarm over the administration’s handling of personnel at the bureau. He warned it would be counterproductive to try to politicize the bureau through appointments that circumvent Senate confirmation: “To have credibility, an agency must be free — and perceived to be free — of political interference and policy advocacy.” …

The administration’s job description for the deputy position illustrates the administration’s politicization effort — rather than emphasize the independent status of the post, it states the deputy commissioner will be “assisting the Secretary of Labor in presenting the Department’s interests and policies to Congress, other government agencies, and the public.” In other words: instead of an independent official, the deputy commissioner would be an advocate for administration positions.

To be plain, the appointee would be a Czar of Lies.   

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According to this report and analysis by Tom Blumer, the manipulation of figures has already started in the Census Bureau:

The Census Bureau’s recently created “Supplemental Poverty Measure” (SPM) looks like a ruse to artificially show economic and poverty-reducing improvement in time for the 2012presidential election. Longer-term, it appears to be a rigged mechanism for demonstrating how ObamaCare … is a resounding success. …

SPM radically redefines what it means to be “low income,” in the process adding almost 40 million more people to that category in 2010 compared to the number in the bureau’s official income and poverty report. …

The only problem that matters to Barack Obama and his reelection team is the political impact of the official poverty rate. During the supposed era of Hope and Change, the rate has stubbornly and sharply increased. In 2007, the year before the arrival of what I have been calling the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) economy since mid-2008, that official rate was 12.5%, about the same as the previous four years. After increasing to 13.2% in 2008, it zoomed to 14.3% in 2009. When it hit 15.1% in 2010, it meant that the administration’s supposedly brilliant set of Keynesian policies had essentially taken us back to where we were in the early 1990s. The official poverty rate seems virtually assured to increase yet again when the bureau releases its results in September 2012, at which point the rate will likely be higher than at any time since the mid-1960s.

To be clear, the problem from Team Obama’s perspective isn’t that more and more people are living in economic misery. … The real problem is that the American people have learned that more and more of their fellow citizens are economically miserable. Even worse, they will have that message reinforced less than two months before Election Day 2012 — unless something is done about how poverty is measured and reported.

For years the left wanted figures to show as many poor people as possible.

Now suddenly they want the numbers to go down.

Enter SPM. The irony of its creation is more than a little hard to take. After decades during which leftists ridiculed conservatives and others who validly criticized official poverty measurements for excluding obvious items like the value of non-cash government benefits such as food stamps and traditional welfare from available resources, all of a sudden effective in 2009 the administration tasked the Census Bureau with developing SPM, which incorporates those and similar items into its measurement base.

But SPM … arbitrarily deducts a number of expenses from income to arrive at a new “resource measure” …  then compares that new “resource measure” to a clearly higher poverty threshold than the bureau has officially used for almost 50 years … [so] when next year’s SPM report comes out, millions of Americans will no longer be “low income” under its framework. I can imagine the campaign verbiage already: “Barack Obama … singlehandedly moved millions into the middle class … undoing much of the damage of the past decade’s misguided policies.”

As to the ObamaCare gambit: State-run health care will very visibly and quickly remove most medical out-of-pocket expenses from millions of Americans. In return, of course, we know from experience in other countries that they’ll have longer waits for care, be subject to rationing, receive lower quality care, and see a virtual end to medical innovation. But those things won’t be as immediately visible. Thus, ObamaCare will in its early years appear to almost painlessly move millions more from SPM’s “low income” category into the middle class. Again, thanks to artifice, Obama will look like a hero.

It must be nice to be able to create your own customized measurement to arrive at the conclusions you want.

As Mark Twain said that Disraeli said, there are three degrees of lies:  Lies, damned lies, and statistics.

This is by Ileana Johnson Paugh and comes from Canada Free Press:

I bet you did not know that we had an Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues. I did not realize that global women existed. I did not know that we had a czarina to represent third world female population’s interests in our administration. The post was created by President Obama on April 6, 2009.

Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues, Melanne Verveer, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, traveled to Durban, South Africa to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in order “to highlight the critical and largely untapped potential of women to combat climate change.” Who knew that women were so powerful that they could affect climate change!

As I read this brief report, I envisioned billions of dollars washing down the proverbial drain with the blessing of an eager administration to re-distribute our “socially unjust” and “unfairly earned, evil capitalist” wealth.

Ambassador-at-Large Melanne Verveer mentioned studies that have shown that women “are on the frontline of, and suffer disproportionately from, the impacts of climate change.” As I googled women’s suffering from the impact of climate change, I found no such studies.

Ambassador-at-Large Verveer states that women are a “powerful force for finding solutions to climate change across the board, including areas of agriculture, sustainable forest management, and energy access.” Because “a small minority of women farmers have access to land tenure (Food and Agriculture Organization report and we know how reliable UN reports are),” women’s potential to combat climate change is limited.”

Who knew that the simple act of owning land could combat climate change?

Using a generic statement, “studies have shown,” without mentioning any studies, Ambassador-at-Large Verveer states, “women with right to property are significantly more capable of investing in climate-smart agricultural productivity.” I had no idea that such a practice existed in agriculture, “climate-smart productivity.” It seems that there is no end to the leftist push to justify UN schemes to milk more funds from the United States in order to enrich the coffers of third world dictatorships.

Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) defines “climate-smart productivity” as “conservation agriculture, integrated pest management, agroforestry, and sustainable diets.”

This type of agriculture promoted by FAO “sustainably increases productivity, resilience (adaptation), reduces/removes greenhouse gases (mitigation) while enhancing the achievement of national food security development goals.” …

Ponderous jargon characterizes left-wing official-speak. A special torment of our time, all too “sustainable”.

According to Ambassador-at-Large Verveer’s report, “women have untapped potential for increasing energy access, which directly relates to climate change.” In case you are confused, the report continues, “3 billion people globally still rely on traditional cookstoves and open fires to prepare food for their families.” Since women are responsible for cooking and collecting fuel, the resulting smoke exposure causes an “estimated two million premature deaths annually, with women and children being most affected.” She follows that it “puts women at risk of gender based violence.”

What does climate change have to do with gender based violence? Would less gender based violence decrease climate change? If we were to cook less and eat raw food, would that alter climate change? …

I am trying to understand this climate change contorted logic. Humans use stoves to cook and that causes climate change; females collect wood to burn in the stoves to prepare food and they contribute to climate change; smoke exposure causes premature deaths but women and children are most affected. I still cannot figure out how it causes gender-based violence; I am still scratching my head.

But as Whatsisname said: Arguing with a woman is like trying to crack an egg on a pillow.

Ambassador-at-Large Vermeer suggests that we have to “build a global market for clean cookstoves” because they impact the climate through “greenhouse gases and short-lived particles such as black carbon.” In her opinion, if women were integrated into the supply chain of clean cookstoves, new economic development opportunities would be created for women. She follows with a quote by Secretary Clinton that “women create a multiplier effect in local communities because they disproportionately spend more of their earned income on food, healthcare, home improvement, and schooling.”

Now I am totally lost. The Ambassador-at-Large Verveer introduces more variables to the role of women in combating climate change: food, healthcare, home improvement, and schooling, without really explaining how it all ties in with her flawed hypothesis. Since she references two more UN organizations, Feed the Future and the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, it is important to note that the Global Alliance is a “private-public UN initiative to save lives, improve livelihoods, empower women, and combat climate change by creating a thriving global market for clean and efficient household cooking solutions.”

The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, which was launched on September 21, 2010 in Washington, D.C., has 240 partners and the following founders: German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, Government of Norway, Peru, Morgan Stanley, Shell, Shell Foundation, the Netherlands, U.S. Agency for International Development, U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S. Department of State., Environmental Protection Agency, and the United Nations Foundation.

The United States is in the platinum donor category with $5 million dollars, Department of Energy, EPA, Department of State are in the gold donor category with $1-5 million each, along with socialist European nations such as bankrupt Spain and Ireland, the World Bank, and other UN affiliates.

The Department of Energy is awarding “Clean Biomass Cookstove Technologies” grants of $100,000 and $750,000 at a time when our country is broke, unemployment is at an all time high, taxpayers are unhappy, and the administration is demanding that we reduce our consumption of energy.

The “science” provided under the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves consists of two articles, one published in Le Monde by Bertrand d’Armagnac on November 13, 2011 and another published in Bloomberg by Jonathan Alter on November 24, 2011. Both cross-reference World Health Organization data that 2 million people die annually from smoke inhalation, more than malaria, TB, and AIDS combined. Apparently the fuel, wood, dung, makeshift charcoal, and agricultural waste, are directly responsible for 2 million deaths, particularly in women and children. These third world dictatorships are incapable of running their countries, feeding, sheltering, and caring for their people properly. It is mind boggling and highly suspicious that they can keep such accurate disease and death rate data.

I am not disputing the fact that people have died throughout history from unsanitary and unhealthy living conditions. We have waged education wars to improve living conditions and spent trillions of dollars to alleviate poverty around the world, yet we do not seem to be any closer today than we were in the beginning. The corrupt governments have stolen the money and personally enriched themselves instead of improving their citizens’ living conditions. To continue this pattern is absolute madness.

Ambassador-at-Large Verveer is very proud of “our efforts to build on the gender equality and women empowerment language in the Cancun agreements.” It seems that lip service is quite an accomplishment as long as the “language on gender balance related to the composition of the board of the new Green Climate Fund, the Standing Committee, and the Adaptation Committee” are in line with the UN Agenda. …

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We have quoted Dr Ileana Johnson Paugh a number of times with appreciation.

We compliment her on not being a woman like Melanne Verveer. (See our post Of adults and women, September 4, 2010)

We’d bet that she – as Margaret Thatcher once said of herself – owes nothing to feminism.*

Or “women’s studies”. Pseudo disciplines like  “women’s studies” are exercises in self-inflicted-wound-licking. If Isaac Newton had concentrated on “scientist studies” instead of science, we might never have had the Enlightenment.

*Feminism: a fake cause; a division of Victimology; a sustained gripe by Western women belonging to the most privileged class in human history.