Investigation of illegal trafficking in human bodily organs in Kosovo has revealed more victims besides the Serbs who were kidnapped, killed, and butchered for their organs during the Kosovo War and its aftermath. Once the supply of Serb victims ran out, the criminals used fraud to obtain kidneys from desperately impoverished living donors, and transplanted those kidneys into unwitting recipients. The organ donors never received the promised financial recompense, but were simply dumped out after the surgery to fend for themselves.

Kosovo organ trade probe tracking victims abroad

AFP/Pristina

EU prosecutors in Kosovo trying seven people accused of organ trafficking in a landmark case said yesterday that they had asked Russia, Ukraine, Israel and Turkey to help them identify victims of the scam.

“We have several requests for legal assistance out to many countries including most importantly the Russian Federation, Israel, Ukraine and Turkey, requesting legal assistance to identify and locate victim donors as a matter of urgency,” EU special prosecutor Jonathan Ratel told AFP.

The seven suspects are accused of organ trafficking and of being part of an organised crime ring in the so-called Medicus case, named after the Pristina clinic where the crimes allegedly took place.

The main defendants in the case, which is being heard before EU judges in a Pristina court and prosecuted by EU lawyers, are former Kosovo health secretary Ilir Rrecaj and Lutfi Dervishi, a prominent Pristina urologist.

Other suspects in the case include Turkish doctor Yusuf Sonmez, who is accused of having carried out illegal operations to remove organs, and Moshe Harel, an Israeli accused of recruiting and bringing the victims to Kosovo. They are both indicted in Turkey.

According to the indictment, the victims were recruited from poor eastern European and Central Asian countries. They were promised about 15,000 euros ($19,440) for organs, while recipients were charged up to 100,000 euros.

The charge sheet alleges that around 20 victims identified so far were not paid the promised amount for their organs but were left to their own devices after their kidneys were taken from them.

“They were literally cast aside at the airport. They were discarded as used material after the operation,” Ratel said.

The Medicus clinic was raided by police in 2008 after Turkish national Yilman Altun, 28, nearly collapsed at Pristina airport waiting for a flight back to Istanbul after donating a kidney to an Israeli man.

After that incident in Kosovo, Altun disappeared.

“He is still missing. And he is probably the most important witness,” Ratel said. “I need to find him. I need this witness.”

The prosecutor is also working with the US, Canada, Germany and Britain to find more victims.

“We are working aggressively with all those countries and pursuing that with everything we have, (so we can) locate and identify and have those victims as witnesses,” he said.

On Monday an American witness, New York store manager Joseph Koralashvili, testified via video-link how he had joined his late father Raphael from Israel on a trip to Kosovo to receive a kidney transplant in October 2008. “His kidneys were no longer functioning. That’s why he was very ill,” the 41-year-old said.

Koralashvili, whose father died three months ago from leukaemia, told the court that no one at the Medicus clinic had identified himself or herself as a doctor to him and his father during their six-day stay in Pristina.

“Did you know where that kidney your father received came from?” Ratel asked him by video link.

“No,” replied Kotalashvili whose testimony was secured with the help of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

It is the first such case with an international dimension tackled by the European rule of law mission EULEX, which has about 3,000 members and which was launched after Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008.

The Medicus clinic was mentioned in the report of Council of Europe special rapporteur Dick Marty, who alleged that Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci and some his associates from the ethnic Albanian guerrillas were involved in organised crime and organ trafficking during the 1998-1999 war with Serbia.

However Ratel insisted that “there is no clear evidence of any link between the private clinic Medicus and any other allegation during the conflict at this time”.

Ratel is being deceptive here. Dick Marty’s report is well known, but the EULEX investigators are simply unwilling to investigate or publicize any cases where Serbs are the victims.

Iran threatens Jews overseas. How very Nazi-like.

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Uploaded by SDAMatt2a on Feb 4, 2012

Nice pals ya got there, liberals.

“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.”
=============
The status of Israel has become a pivotal issue in all talks about the Middle East. Israel’s legitimacy rests, not just on United Nations resolutions or Zionist aspirations, but, for many, on Biblical narratives and the historical connections of Jews with the Holy Land. A minority of Muslims find justification for the Zionist enterprise equally in the Bible and the Qur’an and believe that the Qur’an offers divine sanction for the establishment of a Jewish state in southern Syria. However, the majority cite other Qur’anic verses and passages from the Hadith (purported records of the Prophet Muhammad’s actions and sayings), stating the exact opposite. This second, negative attitude toward Jews is expressed in sacred texts and in the body of Shari’a (Islamic law) where Jews, like all non-Muslims, are assigned a status that does not permit their becoming rulers over Muslims or over Muslim territory.
Traditionally, this has not been an issue. Under the different Muslim empires, Jews were kept firmly in their place and represented no sort of threat to the ruling order. It is only in the modern period that this has become a burning issue. Thus, the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the British Mandate to modern Israel has been as much a religious as a political clash. The Arab onslaught of 1948 was religiously motivated, as is modern opposition to Israel by Islamist groups.

The Hamas charter asserts that “the Islamic Resistance Movement [i.e. Hamas] regards Palestine as an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future generations until Judgment Day.” A waqf is a religious endowment bestowed by God. Consequently, “neither it, nor any part of it, should be squandered: Neither it, nor any part of it, should be given up. Neither a single Arab country nor all Arab countries, neither any king or president, nor all the kings and presidents, neither any organization nor all of them, be they Palestinian or Arab, possess the right to do that. Palestine is an Islamic Waqf land consecrated for Muslim generations until Judgment Day.”

The charter is not unique: It represents a mainstream view among Muslims today. In contrast, several Muslim spokesmen have recently claimed that the Qur’an promises Israel to the Jews and that the claims of Hamas, Hezbollah, and allied groups are illegitimate on Islamic grounds. This is a comforting message, which some of these spokesmen have taken to Jewish audiences, reinforcing the idea that the Islamic jihad imperative against Israel is simply the province of a tiny minority of extremists and that the voices of reason, moderation, and Qur’anic authenticity will eventually prevail.

Although an extremely comforting message to supporters of Israel, it is not true and is based on a partial and inaccurate reading of the Qur’an.

- Robert Spencer

In view of the above story, the Iranians have no basis for complaint when the Israelis make fun of them in an advertisement. Because a Samsung tablet was shown in an “insulting” ad for Israeli cable TV services, Iran is threatening a boycott of Samsung. Yes, Samsung should indeed apologize – NOT for the ad, but for having traded with Iran in the first place.

He who sups with the devil should have a long spoon.

Iran banning Samsung products over an Israeli Ad (Subtitled)

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Uploaded by Concord9000 on Feb 3, 2012

A senior lawmaker says Iran’s Majlis is considering a plan to cut off the country’s economic transactions with South Korea’s Samsung in reaction to the company’s anti-Iran teaser.

Head of Majlis Energy Committee Arsalan Fat’hipour said the double-urgency plan, aimed at imposing a complete ban on buying all Samsung products, would make the company regret making the insulting teaser.

South Korea’s giant manufacturer of electronic devices and home appliances produced a teaser shortly after the assassination of the Iranian scientist Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan by Mossad agents in Tehran, in which Iran had been depicted as a primitive society.

The clip also implies that Israel is powerful enough to easily destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities or assassinate the country’s nuclear scientists.

The Iranian lawmaker added that forgetting the high volume of its trade with Iran, the company has produced the teaser to curry favor with Israel.

Fat’hipour said Samsung’s apology to the Iranian nation, though necessary, would not be enough and that the company must be held accountable for producing the teaser.

Meanwhile, Samsung’s Dubai office has issued a statement condemning the production of the teaser by the company’s Israel office.

Samsung’s public relations official in Tehran, Elaheh Taheri, told reporters on Thursday the clip had nothing to do with the South Korean company and that it had been produced by an Israeli cable TV station, Hot.

When anyone refers to Hitler or the Nazis as “right-wing” or “extreme right,” they are either mistaken or deliberately lying. There is a definite reason why the Nazi Party called itself the National Socialist German Workers Party.

The Independent: Hitler and the socialist dream

(h/t: Blazing Cat Fur)

He declared that ‘national socialism was based on Marx’. Socialists have always disowned him. But a new book insists that he was, at heart, a left-winger.

George Watson – Sunday 22 November 1998

In April 1945, when Adolf Hitler died by his own hand in the rubble of Berlin, nobody was much interested in what he had once believed. That was to be expected. War is no time for reflection, and what Hitler had done was so shattering, and so widely known through images of naked bodies piled high in mass graves, that little or no attention could readily be paid to National Socialism as an idea. It was hard to think of it as an idea at all. Hitler, who had once looked a crank or a clown, was exposed as the leader of a gang of thugs, and the world was content to know no more than that.

Half a century on, there is much to be said. Even thuggery can have its reasons, and the materials that have newly appeared, though they may not transform judgement, undoubtedly enrich and deepen it. Confidants of Hitler. such as the late Albert Speer, have published their reminiscences; his wartime table-talk is a book; early revelations like Hermann Rauschning’s Hitler Speaks of 1939 have been validated by painstaking research, and the notes of dead Nazis like Otto Wagener have been edited, along with a full text of Goebbels’s diary.

It is now clear beyond all reasonable doubt that Hitler and his associates believed they were socialists, and that others, including democratic socialists, thought so too. The title of National Socialism was not hypocritical. The evidence before 1945 was more private than public, which is perhaps significant in itself. In public Hitler was always anti-Marxist, and in an age in which the Soviet Union was the only socialist state on earth, and with anti-Bolshevism a large part of his popular appeal, he may have been understandably reluctant to speak openly of his sources. His megalomania, in any case, would have prevented him from calling himself anyone’s disciple. That led to an odd and paradoxical alliance between modern historians and the mind of a dead dictator. Many recent analysts have fastidiously refused to study the mind of Hitler; and they accept, as unquestioningly as many Nazis did in the 1930s, the slogan “Crusade against Marxism” as a summary of his views. An age in which fascism has become a term of abuse is unlikely to analyse it profoundly.

His private conversations, however, though they do not overturn his reputation as an anti-Communist, qualify it heavily. Hermann Rauschning, for example, a Danzig Nazi who knew Hitler before and after his accession to power in 1933, tells how in private Hitler acknowledged his profound debt to the Marxian tradition. “I have learned a great deal from Marxism” he once remarked, “as I do not hesitate to admit”. He was proud of a knowledge of Marxist texts acquired in his student days before the First World War and later in a Bavarian prison, in 1924, after the failure of the Munich putsch. The trouble with Weimar Republic politicians, he told Otto Wagener at much the same time, was that “they had never even read Marx”, implying that no one who had failed to read so important an author could even begin to understand the modern world; in consequence, he went on, they imagined that the October revolution in 1917 had been “a private Russian affair”, whereas in fact it had changed the whole course of human history! His differences with the communists, he explained, were less ideological than tactical. German communists he had known before he took power, he told Rauschning, thought politics meant talking and writing. They were mere pamphleteers, whereas “I have put into practice what these peddlers and pen pushers have timidly begun”, adding revealingly that “the whole of National Socialism” was based on Marx.

That is a devastating remark and it is blunter than anything in his speeches or in Mein Kampf.; though even in the autobiography he observes that his own doctrine was fundamentally distinguished from the Marxist by reason that it recognised the significance of race – implying, perhaps, that it might otherwise easily look like a derivative. Without race, he went on, National Socialism “would really do nothing more than compete with Marxism on its own ground”. Marxism was internationalist. The proletariat, as the famous slogan goes, has no fatherland. Hitler had a fatherland, and it was everything to him.

Yet privately, and perhaps even publicly, he conceded that National Socialism was based on Marx. On reflection, it makes consistent sense. The basis of a dogma is not the dogma, much as the foundation of a building is not the building, and in numerous ways National Socialism was based on Marxism. It was a theory of history and not, like liberalism or social democracy, a mere agenda of legislative proposals. And it was a theory of human, not just of German, history, a heady vision that claimed to understand the whole past and future of mankind. Hitler’s discovery was that socialism could be national as well as international. There could be a national socialism. That is how he reportedly talked to his fellow Nazi Otto Wagener in the early 1930s. The socialism of the future would lie in “the community of the volk”, not in internationalism, he claimed, and his task was to “convert the German volk to socialism without simply killing off the old individualists”, meaning the entrepreneurial and managerial classes left from the age of liberalism. They should be used, not destroyed. The state could control, after all, without owning, guided by a single party, the economy could be planned and directed without dispossessing the propertied classes.

That realisation was crucial. To dispossess, after all, as the Russian civil war had recently shown, could only mean Germans fighting Germans, and Hitler believed there was a quicker and more efficient route. There could be socialism without civil war.

Now that the age of individualism had ended, he told Wagener, the task was to “find and travel the road from individualism to socialism without revolution”. Marx and Lenin had seen the right goal, but chosen the wrong route – a long and needlessly painful route – and, in destroying the bourgeois and the kulak, Lenin had turned Russia into a grey mass of undifferentiated humanity, a vast anonymous horde of the dispossessed; they had “averaged downwards”; whereas the National Socialist state would raise living standards higher than capitalism had ever known. It is plain that Hitler and his associates meant their claim to socialism to be taken seriously; they took it seriously themselves.

For half a century, none the less, Hitler has been portrayed, if not as a conservative – the word is many shades too pale – at least as an extreme instance of the political right. It is doubtful if he or his friends would have recognised the description. His own thoughts gave no prominence to left and right, and he is unlikely to have seen much point in any linear theory of politics. Since he had solved for all time the enigma of history, as he imagined, National Socialism was unique. The elements might be at once diverse and familiar, but the mix was his.

Hitler’s mind, it has often been noticed, was in many ways backward-looking: not medievalising, on the whole, like Victorian socialists such as Ruskin and William Morris, but fascinated by a far remoter past of heroic virtue. It is now widely forgotten that much the same could be said of Marx and Engels.

It is the issue of race, above all, that for half a century has prevented National Socialism from being seen as socialist. The proletariat may have no fatherland, as Lenin said. But there were still, in Marx’s view, races that would have to be exterminated. That is a view he published in January-February 1849 in an article by Engels called “The Hungarian Struggle” in Marx’s journal the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, and the point was recalled by socialists down to the rise of Hitler. It is now becoming possible to believe that Auschwitz was socialist-inspired. The Marxist theory of history required and demanded genocide for reasons implicit in its claim that feudalism was already giving place to capitalism, which must in its turn be superseded by socialism. Entire races would be left behind after a workers’ revolution, feudal remnants in a socialist age; and since they could not advance two steps at a time, they would have to be killed. They were racial trash, as Engels called them, and fit only for the dung-heap of history.
[...]
Much more here.

Douglas Murray with Michael Coren: Islam-Europe is Confused and Lost

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No Islamofascism
Nowhere Nowhere

Douglas Murray’s Views on Multiculturalism

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Douglas Murray On Multiculture

Douglas Murray – Terrorism, Charity, Hamas, Tuition Fees

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Douglas Murray – Jobs, Alcohol, Tuition Fees & Olympics

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Douglas Murray atomises Tariq Ramadan

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Uploaded by EXTREMECENTRE1 on Sep 15, 2011

Version sous-titrée en français visible ici : http://extremecentre.org/2011/09/15/douglas-murray-atomise-tariq-ramadan/

Voici comment l’écrivain britannique Douglas Murray atomisait Tariq Ramadan, le 28 février dernier, à l’occasion d’un débat sur la construction de mosquées à Athènes, organisé conjointement par le British Council et l’Intelligence Squared Greece (IQ2). Un grand moment à savourer sans modération. Boudiou que c’est bon !

Douglas Murray – Profile at The Henry Jackson Society

Associate Director
douglas.murray[at]henryjacksonsociety.org
+44 (0) 207 340 4520
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Douglas Murray is the Associate Director at the Henry Jackson Society, having joined in April 2011. He previously founded the Centre for Social Cohesion, a think tank studying extremism and terrorism in the UK. A bestselling author and award-winning political commentator, Douglas is a columnist for Standpoint and writes frequently for a variety of other publications, including the Spectator and Wall Street Journal. A prolific debater, Douglas has spoken on a variety of prominent platforms, including at the British and European Parliaments and the White House. He has authored books on neoconservatism, terrorism and national security as well as on freedom of speech. His latest book, Bloody Sunday: Truths, Lies and the Saville Inquiry, was published in November 2011.

See all of Douglas Murray’s work

Media Experience: Extensive – across all BBC platforms, including Question Time and Newsnight; Sky News; Al-Jazeera; Fox News

Expertise: Middle East, specifically Israel and Iran; National security and defence; US and UK foreign policy; Northern Ireland; terrorism; domestic radicalisation; multiculturalism

Current Project: Iran; Israel & NATO

Publications and Analysis

• Islamist Terrorism: The British Connections, Henry Jackson Society, July 7, 2011

External Publications

• Victims of Intimidation: Freedom of Speech within Europes Muslim Communities – Centre for Social Cohesion
• Hate on the State: How British libraries encourage Islamic extremism – Centre for Social Cohesion

Selected Articles

• Push off now, Press TV, and take your conspiracy theories with you, Spectator, January 20, 2012
• Ignore European Court and Deport Abu Qatada Now, , January 18, 2012
• Hague’s misplaced optimism, Spectator, January 13, 2012
• After Spring, Winter, Spectator, November 26, 2011
• St. Paul’s Occupied Cathedral, The Wall Street Journal, November 2, 2011
• The paucity of the “99 per cent”, Spectator, October 30, 2011
• The End of a Delusion, Spectator, October 22, 2011
• Pro-Israel? Time for a British media Fox hunt, The Jewish Chronicle, October 19, 2011
• Must all conservatives answer for the actions of a psychopath?, Spectator, August 8, 2011
• Phone-hacking debate in the Commons: panel verdict, The Guardian, July 6, 2011
• Britain’s line on Israel is a cover for its impotence, The Jewish Chronicle, June 16, 2011
• Rights of terrorists suspects have now overtaken those of the general public, The Telegraph, February 3, 2011
• A Bonus Bonanza for Enemy Combatants, The Wall Street Journal, November 23, 2010

Video on the UN Durban Conference:

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The local Albanian Muslims encountered some negative feedback about their having burned an Orthodox church in Macedonia (see Muslims in Macedonia (FYROM) Riot over Satirical Burqa Dudes at Vevčani Carnival). Muslims elsewhere know how to deal with potential criticism: by staging a “false flag” operation in which they fake an attack on themselves as a play for sympathy. Why not “vandalize” a mosque to make it look as though the Muslims are the victims, and the Christians are the perpetrators?

This time, their plans went comically awry. Maybe they couldn’t read the memo: “Before you try to impersonate a Macedonian Orthodox Christian writing graffiti on a mosque wall, you might want to learn how to write in Macedonian.”

The Macedonian language is a Slavic language very much like Serbian or Bulgarian; it can be written either in the Latin alphabet with the correct accent marks, or in the Cyrillic alphabet, which more accurately represents the phonics, but never a mixture of both. The Albanian language uses the Latin alphabet only, and not many Albanian Muslims are literate in Macedonian, Serbian, or Bulgarian.

Albanians vandalize own mosque to counter negative publicity

Thursday, 02 February 2012

Many described as “uneducated” the individual who wrote several graffitis on a Bitola Mosque. The idea was for media to report a story of supposedly a Christian vandalizing a mosque!!

However, this orchestrated vandalism is almost certainly an act of ethnic Albanian muslims. The reason for this as both local population and police state the culprit wrote the graffitis in terrible Macedonian, mixing both the latin and cyrilic alphabets!

“A Macedonian won’t butcher both the language and the alphabet as this individual did, not a chance!” says a local who saw the graffiti.

It is well known most Albanians aren’t able to write in Cyrilic, however the individual sure made a valiant effort to do so.

Macedonians in Bitola laughed off the “incident” claiming Albanians were trying to portray the Christians as bad after being slammed by the international community (including official Tirana) for burning a Macedonian Church few days ago.

The Irony of it all

While ethnic Albanian muslims damage Christian churches, a group of Albanians in the village of Mala Rechica has been asking local officials to donate buildinig materials and money to rebuild the St George Church after they themselves burned it in 2001.

News has spread from the village that after the 13th century Church was burned, each child born to an ethnic Albanian muslim in Mala Rechica had physical and or mental defects.

Over the years, a total of 14 children in a row were born with severe physical disabilities. The local Albanian muslim families spooked that they may have been cursed for burning the Church, have been in a frantic mode to rebuild the Church as soon as possible, even willing to pay for it!

Some Albanians have learned their lessons it’s wrong to burn sacred places, MINA had found the first in line to put out the fire at the Macedonian Church in Labunista few days ago were ethnic Albanians.

Authorities believe the problems comes from radical extremists among the Albanian population who have been to and accepted the wahabis teachings from Saudi Arabia, UAE, Pakistan etc. The last protest in Struga was attended by veiled women and long bearded man holding signs written in Arabic?!

The question is who are these people and when is police going to make arrests?

Contrary to the story above, eyewitness reports portray the crowd of Muslims as predominantly hostile, with very few of them helping to contain the blaze:

TITLE: Merko lies, mob of Muslims applauded the blaze (31-I-2012, 14.30)

Father Riste Naumoski

I inform everybody that now I came back from the extinguishing of the fire in the Church of St. Nicholas in the village of Labunishta. As the elder of that church that with the help of God, the Church is not completely burned. Above the Church there was a crowd of Muslims who applauded the blaze, and none of them was involved in the localization of the fire, except the family of Demiš Demišoski and Dr. Aladdin, to whom I am grateful.

Do not be fooled by Mr. Mayor of Struga that the Macedonian Muslims participated in extinguishing the fire, while it burned they were chanting slogans against Orthodox [Christians].

Lord Jesus Christ and His great Grace may be with us now and through all eternity. Amen!

———-
Reference:
OhridON Portal:
-Article in original Serbo-Bulgarian: [LINK]
-Automated translation by “Google Translate” (Imprecise; Not recommended for final use): [LINK]

More here:

• Eurasia Review: Macedonia: Orthodox Church Saved from Blaze
• topix: 2012 Civil War in FYROM: News (Chronologically Organized)
• Australian Macedonian Advisory Council: Preliminary Breaking News: Low Level Inter-Ethnic Warfare Erupted in FYROM

The Albanian mafia devastates forests in southern Serbia

Albanians in Kosovo are devastated forests in the southern Serbian province and now find themselves in the municipality of Medvedja, Raska, Kursumlija, Leskovac and Vranje in southern Serbia, writes Belgrade’s “Evening News.” [See: Albanska mafija krade naše šume!] Most Albanians are cut down trees in a forest farm “Kuršumlija” where is the beginning of 2011. The illegally harvested 10,315 cubic meters, which is 62.9 percent of the total illegal logging in the central and southern Serbia, according to a report of illegal deforestation of the Public Company “Srbija”.

Ever since international forces arrived in Kosovo and Metohija, the 1999th year, she began a massive theft of state forests are carried out by the Albanians, but also in municipalities situated in the zone proper.

Executive Director of Forestry and Environmental Protection “Srbija” Predrag Aleksic said that the Serbian state officials are not allowed to enter the safety zone between central Serbia and Kosovo, while on the other hand allow EULEX to Kosovo Albanians.

Aleksic explained that the Albanian mafia organized forest in groups that usually have three tractors, chain saws and a dozen truck. Fall in najtesnije canyons, wherever there is a forest road. To intimidate the forest guards, Albania on the Serbian territory šumokradice shoot or throw grenades in their direction.

It is suspected that the Albanian mafia has forest associates among the Serbs, who live in the municipalities of Kuršumlija, Leskovac, Vranje and Raska Medvedja.

“Most of the stolen wood in Serbia, which is transferred to the province, sold for fuel at a price about 45 euros per cubic meter. In addition, in Kosovo there are wild sawmill, whose forest mafia boss ordered the theft of logs from Serbian forests. They fall, just cut a healthy tree corpse transported to Kosovo, and cut branches left in the forests in southern Serbia. while these cases have been reported, KFOR and EULEX refuse to protect the forest wealth of the Serbian and the Kosovo šumokradice catch,” said Aleksic.

UKPA: Church set on fire after carnival

An Orthodox Christian church famed for its valuable icons was set alight in southern Macedonia overnight amid religious tension between Christians and minority Muslims over a carnival in which Orthodox Christian men dressed as women in burkas and mocked the Koran.

Firefighters extinguished the fire on Monday night in the two century-old Sveti Nikola church, near the town of Struga. The church’s roof was destroyed but its icons were not damaged, the fire service said.

Hours before the fire, Muslim leaders had appealed for calm among community members.

The January 13 Vevčani festival prompted angry, sometimes violent demonstrations by Muslims, who are nearly all ethnic Albanian and make up 33% of the country’s 2.1 million population and accuse the majority of stoking hatred against them.

Ethnic tension has been simmering in this small Balkan country since the end of an armed rebellion in 2001, when ethnic Albanian rebels fought government forces for about eight months, seeking greater rights for their community. The conflict left 80 people dead, and ended with the intervention of Nato peacekeepers.

The Vevčani carnival, said to have been held for some 1,400 years, attracts thousands of visitors. Local residents traditionally wear elaborate, frequently sarcastic masks, with some of the most common costumes including devils and demons.

But this year’s perceived mockery of the Koran and the burka costumes caused outrage.

On Saturday, protesters attacked an inter-city bus heading from Struga to Vevčani, throwing rocks at the vehicle but injuring nobody. They also defaced a Macedonian flag outside Struga’s municipal building, replacing it with a green flag representing Islam. On the same day, perpetrators attacked a church in the nearby village of Labunista, destroying a cross standing outside.

Macedonian Muslim leaders called for restraint but also accused the government of promoting Islamophobia.

Deputy Prime Minister Musa Xhaferi said such incidents “create discord” and “violate mutual respect and trust.”

Read it here.

As always, Muslims blame someone else (in this case, the Macedonians) for their own lack of self-control.

Oh, and by the way, the term “Islamophobia” is an invention of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Seattle PI: Macedonia Muslims urge restraint over carnival

SKOPJE, Macedonia (AP) — Muslim leaders in Macedonia appealed for calm on Monday among community members outraged over a carnival in which Orthodox Christian men mocked Muslims by dressing as Burqa-clad women.

The incident at the Jan. 13 Vevčani festival has prompted angry, sometimes violent demonstrations by Muslims, who make up 33 percent of the country’s 2.1 million population and accuse the majority of stoking hatred against them.

On Saturday, some protesters attacked buses and defaced a Macedonian flag and replaced it with a green flag to represent Islam. On the same day, a church was attacked by unknown perpetrators in the nearby village of Labunista.

In a statement Monday, Macedonian Muslim leaders called for restraint but also accused the government of promoting Islamophobia.

“The behavior of Muslims should be restrained, but, unfortunately, we are concerned that Islamophobia in Macedonia is often combined with government propaganda,” they said. “Such is the case with this carnival that the government annually subsidizes with…the money of all citizens, including Muslims.”

The carnival, said to have been held for some 1,400 years, attracts thousands of visitors. Local resident traditionally wear elaborate, frequently sarcastic masks, with some of the most common costumes including devils and demons.

Muslims in Macedonia are almost all ethnic Albanians. Albanians, in Macedonia and elsewhere, have traditionally been secular, but conservative Islamic schools, especially Wahhabism, have taken a foothold in the years following a brief ethnic Albanian uprising in Macedonia in 2001. This spread has been mainly financed from Saudi Arabia.

Read it here.

Also see:

• MSNBC: Vevčani Carnival Photos
• Macedonian Cultural and Information Centre: Vevčani Carnival
• IDIVIDI: Vevčani carnival is a pearl of Macedonia’s tradition, says Kanceska-Milevska

The New York Times has gone all in for Islamic infiltration and the stealth jihad. By now, we have all come to expect an outpouring of hard-left/pro-jihadi/anti-Semitic/anti-Christian propaganda flooding the Anglosphere from not only the New York Times, but also the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, Time Magazine, Newsweek, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, NBC, PBS, NPR, the CBC in Canada, the BBC and the Guardian in the UK, the ABC in Australia, the AP and Reuters wire services…the list seems endless.

We are so used to it that too few people bother to complain any more as the naked anti-Semitic and pro-Islamic enemy propaganda in the NYT grows ever louder.

Is The NYT’s Agenda to Normalize Islam in the West?

by Phyllis Chesler
Israel National News
January 25, 2012

On a single day, the New York Times has been known to publish anywhere from two to six anti-Israel articles, editorials, op-ed pieces, and letters. Today, I see a new danger arising in their pages.

After spending a year proclaiming the triumph of democracy and the miracle of the Arab Spring and, as PM Netanyahu has just noted, refusing to document the existential danger in which Israel finds herself, the Newspaper of Record has now begun the process of normalizing Islam in North America and Europe. Its pro-Muslim “multicultural” agenda is, paradoxically, another form of racism, but I quibble.

Yesterday, there were at least three articles (3,200 words, four photos, one illustration), devoted to Islam in America and Europe. A 934-word op-ed article titled “How to Integrate Europe’s Muslims” by a Boston College professor is a veritable manifesto of appeasement and racism disguised as a rational call for integration and fairness. Jonathan Laurence suggests that Muslims will be “integrated” into Europe if they are allowed to study Islam at state-sponsored schools, continue their Muslim religious practices, veil women, speak Arabic, Persian, Dari, etc. In his view, this will fend off “fundamentalism” and magically lead to reciprocity in terms of tolerance towards infidels and apostates and to the abolition of Islamic gender and religious apartheid.

According to Canadian professor and author, Dr. Salim Mansur, multiculturalism and the appeasement of tribalism defeats the possibility of citizenship and amounts to a form of “soft bigotry.” As Pascal Bruckner has phrased it: “Multiculturalism is the racism of the anti-racists; it chains people to their roots.” Immigrants are kept confined to their “group” and not encouraged or expected to become “individuals” and “citizens” of a modern democracy.

As we may all recall, the 2011 Goldstone recantation did not make the front page of the NYT; it was buried on page 8. But today, a 1,200 word article, entitled “In Police Training, a Dark Film on U.S. Muslims” is on page one. It continues on page 23 with two photos and it takes up 3/4^th of the second page. The article condemns the use of the film, The Third Jihad, as a “training” device for 1,489 police officers. What is so offensive about this film, which is narrated by a (truly) moderate Muslim, Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, a physician and former American military officer? First the film has been funded by Orthodox Jews and Zionists (horrors!). Second, it dares suggest that Muslims have launched a war against the West, a “third jihad.” And, there is “ominous” music. Then “Muslim terrorists shoot Christians in the head, car bombs explode, children lie covered by sheets…”

Is this reporter unfamiliar with the persecution of Christians in Muslim-majority countries and with the Islamic terrorist attacks against Muslim and infidel civilians and against Western military and civilian targets?

…There is an Islamic/Islamist war that has been declared against the West as well as against both Muslim and infidel civilians, but it is one that the Paper of Record refuses to acknowledge, or to fight or win.
[...]
Why have papers likes the Times become so obsessed with protecting the religious rights of one single minority group at the expense of every other religious group, including members of moderate and anti-Islamist Islam, and at the expense of women, who represent approximately 53% of the world’s population? Are they, too, possibly being funded by leftists and by Arab oil magnates? Or, do they simply hope to be?

Just wondering.

Read it all here.

What about the one network in the US, namely Fox News, that so many rely on to present conservative voices when no other network will? Those days may be gone soon. Last September (see Fox News “Fair and Balanced”? Bzzzzzt, WROOOOONG!), I challenged its undeserved reputation as a “conservative” and/or even-handed news outlet. More recently, Speranza of 2.0: The Blogmocracy also asked, Is Fox News heading left? Indeed, on Fox News, we are hearing fewer and fewer of those voices, and more and more apologists from the left.

I have had no further use for Glenn Beck after he openly began to shill for that amoral and self-serving RINO candidate, Mitt Romney. That said, if George Soros has the power to censor a major television network and cause him to be fired, that is truly dismaying. The audience of Fox News should determine, through their ratings and their patronage of advertisers, whether Glenn Beck continues to be offered a spot in its lineup.

How George Soros Sacked Glenn Beck

by Cliff Kincaid on 19 Oct 2011
A recent interview of Fox News chief Roger Ailes by Howard Kurtz suggested that the channel is becoming less conservative by design. The real question, not addressed in the piece, is whether the relentless attacks on the channel by George Soros-funded groups have anything to do with this change in the direction of the popular channel and the demise of the Glenn Beck program in particular.

On Glenn Beck’s new TV program, carried on the Internet, Beck himself seemed to indicate this was the case. Talking about Orson Wells, his career, vision and his “Citizen Kane” movie, Beck said, “One of the biggest things [he taught me was] he picked a lot of ill-advised fights, sometimes risking his entire career against titans of industry. It did occur to me recently maybe I should have considered that little part of his life a little more before I locked horns with George Soros.”1 The implication is that Beck’s battle with Soros left him without a job on Fox News.

If this is the case, then we have reached a point in the United States when a private individual has obtained the power to prevent the most popular cable news channel in the country from subjecting his financial and political influence to scrutiny. It is important to see how this was done.

In fairness, Fox has covered Soros after the end of the Beck program. But Beck was doing so in a systematic manner by devoting whole shows to the topic. The sheer magnitude of organizations financially supported by the billionaire makes such an analysis necessary. That is what America’s Survival, Inc. we are doing through our Sorosfiles.com project.
[...]
Beck, who had one of the most successful programs on the channel, left Fox News on July 1, 2011, and launched his own Internet TV show, which appears to be a success in terms of paid subscribers. But some are saying that its influence pales in comparison to the perch that Beck had on Fox News. Clearly, the “progressives” who feared Beck were far more concerned about his Fox News Channel program than his Internet venture.

At the recent “Take Back the American Dream Conference,” held October 3-5. 2011, in Washington, D.C., former Obama “Green Jobs Czar” Van Jones claimed that Beck wasn’t on television any more. He said this in the context of admitting that his exit from the Obama Administration, in response to charges made by blogger Trevor Loudon and Beck and others, had been a traumatic time for him.

In fact, of course, Beck is on television, albeit Internet TV. But the point was that Beck was gone from cable television, which was much more of a powerful position in terms of the resources he was able to bring to bear to expose figures like Jones. It is a sign of Beck’s declining influence that Jones was rehabilitated and emerged at the conference as director of the “Take Back the American Dream” movement.

As Howard Kurtz told the story, there has been a “course correction” at Fox News and that the change was “quietly adopted at Fox over the last year” because of the problem posed by the “inflammatory rhetoric” of Glenn Beck, such as “his ranting about Obama being a racist.” Ailes was quoted as saying that this had become a “a bit of a branding issue for us.”

There was no ranting from Beck on this topic. His comments were based in part on Obama’s own statements on racial issues, such as his attack on the police for arresting a black professor, Henry Louis Gates. Obama called the police “stupid,” without knowing the facts about Gates’ obnoxious behavior.

The implication is that Beck was fired – technically a deal was reached in which Fox News said Beck would “transition off” the channel – because of charges that Beck was a racist. But Beck had accused Obama of racism in the summer of 2009 and lost his show over a year later. Something must have happened in the meantime. That “something” was that Beck picked a different target – billionaire George Soros.

It’s true that Beck had been the subject of an advertiser boycott, organized by a group called “Color of Change,” founded by Van Jones, but he still had the number three show in cable news. Howard Kurtz reported Beck still had “monster ratings.”
[...]
Much, much more here.

Glenn Beck Staff Threatened by Soros Operatives

Private Investigator says Beck Staff Threatened by Soros Operatives; News Corporation Failed to Protect Employees, Forcing Beck’s Ouster
…[Cliff] Kincaid recently learned of a private investigator, Douglas J. Hagmann, with information that the Soros role in Beck’s ouster was deeper and more insidious than previously realized. In order to further the public’s right to know as to how the First Amendment right of freedom of the press is being manipulated and subverted by covert forces in U.S. politics, Kincaid asked Hagmann, who is the CEO of Hagmann Investigative Services, Inc., and director of the Northeast Intelligence Network for permission to pass on this information. He has agreed, as long as the identities of the sources of information are deleted. There are several sources with information about strange goings-on at News Corporation in regard to the Glenn Beck matter, in which the most vulnerable of the news channel staff members have come under pressure not to report certain facts and information about President Obama personally. But Hagmann says the tipping point in the matter of Glenn Beck leaving the channel came when Beck began a series of programs on Soros, labeled by Beck the “Puppet Master” behind Obama and the progressive movement.

Hagmann informed Kincaid of the following:

“One of my sources, beginning in the first part of 2011, told me that the corporate leadership of News Corporation (the parent company of Fox News) began to put pressure on Glenn Beck — and especially his support staff — about certain topics that were considered ‘off limits.’ This source stated that Beck was advised not to focus on George Soros, as there were certain fiduciary relationships he was not privy to between Soros and either News Corporation or one or more of their board members/corporate staff.”

Hagmann went on, “I was informed that News Corporation and/or Fox News Channel officers actually had a meeting with Soros representatives, during which company officials were advised to stop subjecting Soros to on-air scrutiny. This pressure eventually forced Beck off the air, as the Fox News Channel personality became concerned about the physical safety and security of his own personnel.”

Hagmann added that his sources stated that it was Beck’s concern over the safety of certain staff members, the most vulnerable and exposed among them, who were being overtly intimidated. He stated that one young woman, who became a primary source after being vetted and determined to be credible, was genuinely afraid, not only for her career but for her life and the life of her child. It was surreal, she told Hagmann, that she could be subjected to intimidation through surveillance and veiled threats because of her position to Glenn Beck. At some point, Hagmann added, it appeared Mr. Beck knew he could protect himself and his family, but not everyone involved in the program. “I strongly suspect, based on my professional experience as an investigator for the last 26 years, that Mr. Beck made a tremendous career sacrifice for the safety of others. That speaks volumes about Mr. Beck’s integrity, character and concern for others,” added Hagmann.

ASI President Cliff Kincaid said that investigator Hagmann’s information, while non-specific at this point because of concerns over revealing the identities of sources, is extremely troubling, as it concerns the ability of the American people to get access to information of a critical nature…

Read it all here.

Also see:

• Manufactured Anger Over Islamo-realistic Film Designed to Whack NYPD Into Dhimmitude
• ‘The Third Jihad’ Producers Reply to New York Times Articles

Jewish Defence League to confront
anti-Israel Mayor Stéphane Gendron
Thursday, January 26, 2012, 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm
Office of the Mayor, 23, rue King, Huntingdon, Québec

The recent public statements by Mr. Stéphane Gendron the Mayor of Huntingdon, Québec is a violation of the Charter of Rights of Canada and a threat to the security of the Jewish Community. He recently said Israel should not exist. In other words, the Six Million Jews in Israel should not exist.

As CTV reports, the rant wasn’t Gendron’s first offense; he had been removed in the past from the airwaves following complaints after comparing Israelis to Nazis in a newspaper interview.

Read more: Small-Town Mayor Rants Against Israel

Québec TV Host Claims Israel Indiscriminately Murders Innocent Palestinians With Bulldozers

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Jewish Defence League will picket outside the offices of Mayor Stéphane Gendron and demand that he step down as Mayor or be fired.

For additional information, call 416-736-7000.
www.jdl-canada.com

Blazing Cat Fur has some interesting photos of this Mayor.

by E.W. Jackson Sr. – June 16, 2009

Like Obama, I am a graduate of Harvard Law School. I too have Muslims in my family. I am black, and I was once a leftist Democrat. Since our backgrounds are somewhat similar, I perceive something in Obama’s policy toward Israel which people without that background may not see. All my life I have witnessed a strain of anti-Semitism in the black community. It has been fueled by the rise of the Nation of Islam and Louis Farrakhan, but it predates that organization.

We heard it in Jesse Jackson’s “HYMIE town” remark years ago during his presidential campaign. We heard it most recently in Jeremiah Wright’s remark about “them Jews” not allowing Obama to speak with him. I hear it from my own Muslim family members who see the problem in the Middle East as a “Jew” problem.

Growing up in a small, predominantly black urban community in Pennsylvania, I heard the comments about Jewish shop owners. They were “greedy cheaters” who could not be trusted, according to my family and others in the neighborhood. I was too young to understand what it means to be Jewish, or know that I was hearing anti-Semitism. These people seemed nice enough to me, but others said they were “evil”. Sadly, this bigotry has yet to be eradicated from the black community.

In Chicago, the anti-Jewish sentiment among black people is even more pronounced because of the direct influence of Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. Most African Americans are not followers of “The Nation”, but many have a quiet respect for its leader because, they say, “he speaks the truth” and “stands up for the black man”. What they mean of course is that he viciously attacks the perceived “enemies” of the black community – white people and Jews. Even some self-described Christians buy into his demagoguery.

The question is whether Obama, given his Muslim roots and experience in Farrakhan’s Chicago, shares this antipathy for Israel and Jewish people. Is there any evidence that he does. First, the President was taught for twenty years by a virulent anti-Semite, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. In the black community it is called “sitting under”. You don’t merely attend a church, you “sit under” a Pastor to be taught and mentored by him. Obama “sat under” Wright for a very long time. He was comfortable enough with Farrakhan – Wright’s friend – to attend and help organize his “Million Man March”. I was on C-Span the morning of the march arguing that we must never legitimize a racist and anti-Semite, no matter what “good” he claims to be doing. Yet a future President was in the crowd giving Farrakhan his enthusiastic support.

The classic left wing view is that Israel is the oppressive occupier, and the Palestinians are Israel’s victims. Obama is clearly sympathetic to this view. In speaking to the “Muslim World,” he did not address the widespread Islamic hatred of Jews. Instead he attacked Israel over the growth of West Bank settlements. Surely he knows that settlements are not the crux of the problem. The absolute refusal of the Palestinians to accept Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state is the insurmountable obstacle. That’s where the pressure needs to be placed, but this President sees it differently. He also made the preposterous comparison of the Holocaust to Palestinian “dislocation”.

Obama clearly has Muslim sensibilities. He sees the world and Israel from a Muslim perspective. His construct of “The Muslim World” is unique in modern diplomacy. It is said that only The Muslim Brotherhood and other radical elements of the religion use that concept. It is a call to unify Muslims around the world. It is rather odd to hear an American President use it. In doing so he reveals more about his thinking than he intends. The dramatic policy reversal of joining the unrelentingly ant-Semitic, anti-Israel and pro-Islamic UN Human Rights Council is in keeping with the President’s truest – albeit undeclared – sensibilities.

Those who are paying attention and thinking about these issues do not find it unreasonable to consider that President Obama is influenced by a strain of anti-Semitism picked up from the black community, his leftist friends and colleagues, his Muslim associations and his long period of mentorship under Jeremiah Wright. If this conclusion is accurate, Israel has some dark days ahead. For the first time in her history, she may find the President of the United States siding with her enemies. Those who believe as I do that Israel must be protected had better be ready for the fight. We are.

NEVER AGAIN!
E.W. Jackson is Bishop of Exodus Faith Ministries, an author and retired attorney. Email: bshpjksn@gmail.com

Thanks Froike. If you email me at standamerica@cox.net, I’ll put you on my email the list to receive my national commentaries which air on Radio America. I am also President of STAND, Staying True to America’s National Destiny. One of our tenets is support and protection of Israel. Never Again!
G-d bless you too. Bishop Jackson

“Freedom Fest” – NORFOLK, Va, – Bishop E.W. Jackson speaking at FreedomFest2010 at Old Dominion University. –”This group does not disagree with the president because of the color of skin, but because the content of his policies!”
Website - Bishop E.W. Jackson – “Exodus Faith Ministries”
Book - “Ten Commandments to an Extraordinary Life”

Massive opposition research file on Romney hits Internet, likely from 2008 McCain campaign

If you think you’ve already heard everything there is to know about Mitt Romney, think again. A 200-page document that appears to be Sen. John McCain’s entire 2008 election-year opposition research file on the former Massachusetts governor hit the Internet with a vengeance Tuesday evening. And it’s an eye-opener.

The file explores everything from the assessed value of Romney’s house (“$3.162 million”) to his views on the Boy Scouts’ ban of homosexuals (“publicly opposed … in 1994 and 2002 campaigns”). It was made public Tuesday on the social media website Buzzfeed, although it appears to have been accessible online for two months.

The document, given the name “The Romney Book,” was viewed less than 100 times on the page where it was originally uploaded by its anonymous leaker on November 11.

Neither McCain nor his former presidential campaign staffers have authenticated the untitled document, and McCain’s recent endorsement of Romney makes that highly unlikely. Still, the file is comprehensive enough — even by Washington, D.C. opposition-research standards — to suggest that it was assembled as a tool to counter a Romney candidacy on a national scale. And the news articles it references stop late in 2007.
[...]
More here.

Link: McCain 2008 Oppo File on Mitt Romney (PDF)

We have hosted a copy of this file on 1389 Blog. Click the above link to view or download.

John Ransom: Romney’s Crony Capitalism Problem

[...]
While the GOP establishment has been busy denouncing Newt as promoting “class warfare” by his attacks on Mitt and Bain, they’ve missed the bigger picture issue that rank and file GOP voters have responded to: Mitt Romney’s experience doesn’t make him the anti-Obama. Rather, Mitt’s Wall Street past, combined with his record as governor of Massachusetts, represent the alliance between government and business that has led to runaway spending no matter which side has been in power.

Sure, Washington is to blame for most of the mess, but Wall Street has been complicit too. Behind every Solyndra loan was a commercial bank- in Solyndra’s case the Federal Financing Bank- that benefited from the risk free- for them- loans. Behind the financing of every budget deficit are more fees for Wall Street.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? They operated as a giant Ways and Means committee for Wall Street to off-load America’s housing risk on to the government. To be sure, Wall Street was just maximizing profits, as it’s supposed to. But is Romney the guy who’s going to shut down the Combine between business and government?

This from Scott Rasmussen:

While Romney would hope to position himself as a defender of free market competition, he is potentially vulnerable on the topic because only 35 percent of Americans believe that capitalism and a free market economy are the same thing. Candidate Romney, like many Republicans, tends to use the terms interchangeably. That’s dangerous when 39 percent of voters nationwide believe the country has a system of crony capitalism, while only 34 percent believe free market capitalism is practiced. The rest aren’t sure.

 Interestingly, this is one issue with very little partisan divide. Republican, Democrats and unaffiliated voters hold similarly skeptical views. Seven out of 10 Americans believe that big government and big business work together against the rest of us. Voters don’t mind businesses getting big; they just mind when the government gives them an unfair advantage over others.

Like what happened in Romneycare.

“What motivated Romney to enact RomneyCare, as former Romney/Obama adviser Jonathan Gruber explains here,” writes Cato’s healthcare policy expert Michael Cannon, “was the widespread desire (within Massachusetts) to hang on to $385 million of federal Medicaid money that Massachusetts had secured using one of Medicaid’s notorious and fraudulent “provider tax” scams.  In other words, the whole purpose of RomneyCare was to enable Massachusetts to hold on to $385 million that it received by defrauding and taxing residents of other states.  And of course, Romney/RomneyCare caused the tax burden that Massachusetts effectively imposes on non-Massachusetts residents to grow.”

When Romneycare was crafted there were people sitting around a table talking about healthcare, but they weren’t talking about cancer, or broken bones. They were talking about money. You got it and they want more of it, risk free in the same way they off-loaded risk in the housing sector.

While other parts of the economy are struggling, the healthcare sector is approaching all-time highs as represented by the S&P healthcare Select Sector fund. Romneycare and Obamacare, as seen in the chart below, have created an artificial floor for healthcare investments, protecting investors in a way that investors in the S&P 500, for example, don’t enjoy.

(Chart courtesy Yahoo! Finance)

The sooner we separate Washington from Wall Street, the better. And Romney is the only GOP candidate who forfeits the moral high ground in that argument to Obama. Any other GOP candidate will be able to credibly chastise Obama for the crony capitalism practiced by the left. But not Romney.

GOP voters, thankfully, haven’t been gulled into believing that every investor automatically qualifies as a free market capitalist- see Buffett, Warren and Soros, George. Voters are rightly saying that they are not sure that being a venture capitalist qualifies one, per se, to be president anymore than being a community organizer does; especially when one factors in Mitt’s historic socialization of healthcare in Massachusetts.

For GOP voters you can’t find a bigger attack on free markets or a stronger case of crony capitalism and government than that which Romneycare represents.
[...]
Read it all here.

A minor quibble about the term “crony capitalism”:

As I just finished pointing out, the term “crony capitalism” is nothing more than a euphemism for government pork-barrel corruption. It is not about “capitalism” at all; it’s about buying votes, endorsements, campaign contributions, and other advantages through government spending and regulations that favor well-connected individuals and firms over everyone else. Whether it’s legal or not, it’s bad for America and it’s wrong, and Tea Party conservatives want no part of it.

The “New Class Elite” demographic that Obama relies on for campaign funds are the mortal enemies of America’s middle class and working poor.

This leftist/pro-jihadi/radical-eco elite are the ones perpetrating class warfare, and they consider themselves accountable to no one. As members of this elite see it, their quality of life and, indeed, their continued existence, depend on their use of government power to deny opportunities to the rest of us. They have become America’s Soviet-style nomenklatura.

They are killing the American Dream.

Volokh Conspiracy: The Fragmenting of the New Class Elites, or, Downward Mobility

Kenneth Anderson • October 31, 2011 11:27 am
Glenn Reynolds is correct in his weekend post to point to the social theory of the New Class as key to understanding the convulsions in the middle and upper middle class; I’ve written about it myself here at VC and in a 1990s law journal book review essay. The angst is partly income, of course — but it’s also in considerable part, as Glenn notes, “characterized as much by self-importance as by higher income, and is far more eager to keep the proles in their place than, say, [Anne] Applebaum’s small-town dentist. It’s thus not surprising that as its influence has grown, economic opportunity has increasingly been closed down by government barriers.” [emphasis added]

The problem the New Class faces at this point is the psychological and social self-perceptions of a status group that is alienated (as we marxists say) from traditional labor by its semi-privileged upbringing — and by the fact that it is actually, two distinct strands, a privileged one and a semi-privileged one. It is, for the moment, insistent not just on white-collar work as its birthright and unable to conceive of much else. It does not celebrate the dignity of labor; it conceived of itself as existing to regulate labor. So it has purified itself to the point that not just any white-collar work will do. It has to be, as Michelle Obama instructed people in what now has to be seen as another era, virtuous non-profit or government work. Those attitudes are changing, but only slowly; the university pipelines are still full of people who cannot imagine themselves in any other kind of work, unless it means working for Apple or Google. [emphasis added]

The New Class has always operated across the lines of public and private, however, the government-university-finance and technology capital sectors. It is not a theory of the government class versus the business class — as 1990s neoconservatives sometimes mistakenly imagined. As Lasch pointed out, it is the class that bridges and moves effortlessly between the two. As a theory of late capitalism (once imported from being an analysis of communist nomenkaltura) it offers itself as a theory of technocratic expertise first – but, if that spectacularly fails as it did in 2008, it falls back on a much more rudimentary claim of monopoly access to the levers of the economy. Which is to say, the right to bridge the private-public line, and rent out its access. [emphasis added]
[...]
In social theory, OWS is best understood not as a populist movement against the bankers, but instead as the breakdown of the New Class into its two increasingly disconnected parts. The upper tier, the bankers-government bankers-super credentialed elites. But also the lower tier, those who saw themselves entitled to a white collar job in the Virtue Industries of government and non-profits — the helping professions, the culture industry, the virtueocracies, the industries of therapeutic social control, as Christopher Lasch pointed out in his final book, The Revolt of the Elites.

The two tiers of the New Class have always had different sources of rents, however. For the upper tier, since 1990, it has come through its ability to take the benefits of generations of US social investment in education and sell that expertise across global markets — leveraging expertise and access to capital and technological markets in the 1990s to places in Asia and the former communist world in desperate need of it. As Lasch said, the revolt and flight of the elites, to marketize themselves globally as free agents — to take the social capital derived over many generations by American society, and to go live in the jet stream and extract returns on a global scale for that expertise. But that expertise is now largely commodified — to paraphrase David Swenson on financial engineering, that kind of universal expertise is commodified, cheaply available, and no longer commands much premium. As those returns have come under pressure, the Global New Class has come home, looking to command premiums through privileged access to the public-private divide — access most visible at the moment as virtuous new technology projects that turn out to be mere crony capitalism. [emphasis added]

“Crony capitalism” is nothing more than a euphemism for government pork-barrel corruption. “Green jobs” were a scam from the get-go. For just one example, see: Big Government: George Soros Helped Craft Stimulus, Then Invested in Companies Benefiting.

The lower tier is in a different situation and always has been. It is characterized by status-income disequilibrium, to borrow from David Brooks; it cultivates the sensibilities of the upper tier New Class, but does not have the ability to globalize its rent extraction. The helping professions, the professions of therapeutic authoritarianism (the social workers as well as the public safety workers), the virtuecrats, the regulatory class, etc., have a problem — they mostly service and manage individuals, the client-consumers of the welfare state. Their rents are not leveraged very much, certainly not globally, and are limited to what amounts to an hourly wage. The method of ramping up wages, however, is through public employee unions and their own special ability to access the public-private divide. But, as everyone understands, that model no longer works, because it has overreached and overleveraged, to the point that even the system’s most sympathetic politicians understand that it cannot pay up.
[...]
Read it all here.

Neither the working poor, nor the middle class, are to blame for perpetrating class warfare during the run-up to the 2012 elections. The blame for that belongs to Barack Hussein Obama and his many supporters among the leftist power elite:

Rush: Obama Publicly Writes Off White, Working Class Voters as Advertisement to His Base

December 01, 2011

RUSH: James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal. He’s got a great blog called The Best of the Web Today, and he wrote about this yesterday.

This New York Times story, this column by Thomas Edsall on Monday where the regime, the Obama campaign says to white working class families: We’re not interested in your votes; we don’t care. Now, Taranto’s point yesterday was (summarized): “Okay, fine. If after election strategery, why advertise it? Why talk about it? Why assign one of your minions to go out and write an op-ed about it in the New York Times? Why get people like Limbaugh talking about this?” And, frankly, it’s a great point, and I, El Rushbo, I must admit, I hadn’t considered that angle. I did raise a question: Imagine if the Republicans had done something similar. Imagine if whoever the Republican nominee is, after securing the nomination, says, “You know what? To hell with the Hispanic vote! We don’t care. We’re not interested in it. We’re gonna win this election without them.” Can you imagine the hell that would rain down on the Republican Party and that nominee?

Here you’ve got an assigned editorial, no doubt from the White House or Plouffe or whoever is running the campaign for Obama. They put it in the op-ed page of the New York Times, which guarantees it gets out. It guarantees it gets discussed just like remember that picture of Hillary and Bill dancing on the beach down at the Virgin Islands somewhere in their swimsuits a couple of weeks before the Monica Lewinsky story hit? The picture ran in one paper. It ran on the cover of the LA Times. At the press briefing somebody stands up and asks McCurry, “Wa, wa, what’s the story behind that picture?”

Everybody said, “What picture?”

That’s how they got it out. They wanted that picture out, and it was later discovered that Bill and Hillary were dancing with no music. The whole thing was staged just like the rocks on the beached at Normandy. It was all staged. So here you have this guy Thomas Edsall, he used to write to for the Washington Post, now writes for the Huffing and Puffington Post, and whatever liberal publication will have him. He’s out there saying, “We’re gonna win this election without white working-class voters.” Why advertise it? Why advertise that? Well, the theory to explain it, the theory in answer to the question is that Obama’s in such bad shape with his base that that’s how he’s going to rally them.

He is in such bad shape, they’ve got to roll the dice. In order to secure the base — the takers, the people who aren’t doing diddly-squat, the people who have been made dependent on government for everything — he has to run against the bitter clingers; keeping his coalition of artists and professors and professor assistants, so forth, all that intact (plus the 47% that don’t pay taxes and all the people on welfare to one degree or another). The theory is that it’s so bad you advertise that as a way of getting the minorities that make up your base locked in. It’s another example of division, of course: Promoting hatred, resentment, envy, all of that.

Now, you stop and think of it. Insane? It is. I’ve thought it’s stupid from the get-go. I never did understand why advertise it. That was part of my incredulity. I just never expressed it ’til I saw Taranto wrote about it, but that was the one thing about it that had me curious. Aside from the act itself. I mean, the idea that they really don’t think they can win if they pursue policies that will be supported by white working class voters? Imagine that, just by itself, and then they go out and advertise it.

More here.

Environmentalism has turned out to be not only a scam and a vehicle for corruption and government tyranny, but also one more club that the leftist elite can use to hit the middle class and working poor over the head. After all, they are not the ones who will be freezing in the dark.

Spectator: Environmentalism and the Leisure Class

By William Tucker on 1.20.12 @ 6:08AM
[...]
This week President Obama handed down what may prove to be one of the most fateful decisions of his entire administration when he rejected the plan to build the Keystone XL Pipeline carrying oil from the tar sands of Canada to the refineries of Houston. The decision did not win him one new vote but was crucial in protecting his environmental flank. The movie stars and Sierra Club contributors were getting restless and had drawn the line in the sand.

In turning down Keystone, however, the President has uncovered an ugly little secret that has always lurked beneath the surface of environmentalism. Its basic appeal is to the affluent. Despite all the professions of being “liberal” and “against big business,” environmentalism’s main appeal is that it promises to slow the progress of industrial progress. People who are already comfortable with the present state of affairs — who are established in the environment, so to speak — are happy to go along with this. It is not that they have any greater insight into the mysteries and workings of nature. They are happier with the way things are. In fact, environmentalism works to their advantage. The main danger to the affluent is not that they will be denied from improving their estate but that too many other people will achieve what they already have. As the Forest Service used to say, the person who built his mountain cabin last year is an environmentalist. The person who wants to build one this year is a developer. [emphasis added]

Environmentalism has spent three decades trying to hide this simple truth. How can environmentalists be motivated by self-interest when they are anti-business? Doesn’t that align them with the working classes? Well, not quite. You can be anti-business as a union member trying to claim higher wages but you can also be anti-business as a member of the aristocracy who believes “trade” and “commercialism” are crass and not attuned to the higher things in life. Environmentalism is born from the latter, not the former. It has spent decades trying to pretend it has common cause with the working people. With the defeat of the Keystone Pipeline, this is no longer possible. Too many blue-collar and middle-class jobs have been sacrificed on the altar of carbon emissions and global warming.

In 1977, I wrote a cover story for Harper’s called “Environmentalism and the Leisure Class,” my first story for a national magazine. Environmentalism was very young at the time — born supposedly on Earth Day in 1970 — but had already achieved a seat in the upper echelons of the Carter Administration. These freshly appointed bureaucrats began canceling dams, preaching the sins of fossil fuels, and raising obstacles to nuclear power. In its place they promised distant, over-the-horizon technologies of wind and solar energy. I remember one iconic photograph of Andrew Young, Carter’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, holding a pyramid over his head on Earth Day in the fashionable superstition that pyramids had mysterious powers to concentrate the sun’s rays.

My story in Harper’s was built around the devastating 1977 New York City blackout (the subject of the book The Bronx is Burning) and the almost forgotten fact that Con Edison had been trying for 15 years to construct an upstate power plant designed to prevent blackouts. The Storm King Mountain facility was a pumped storage plant 40 miles up the Hudson that stored power overnight by pumping water uphill and then releasing it the next day to generate hydroelectricity. The idea was to avoid building more coal plants in New York City. As an added attraction, the utility never failed to mention, the floodgates could be opened in an instant to provide power in the event of an emergency, while ordinary generators took the better part of an hour to get up to speed.

Pumped storage was considered an engineering marvel of the time and many were built. There are now about 30 around the country. In the Hudson Highlands, however, Con Ed had unwittingly disturbed a nest of New York aristocrats who had escaped from the city in the 19th century. As Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (who now lives in the area) would write 30 years later without a trace of irony:

The committee [the Scenic Hudson Preservation Conference] quickly found support among the well-heeled residents of the Hudson Highlands. Many of its founding members were the children and grandchildren of the Osborns, Stillmans, and Harrimans, the robber barons who had laid out great estates amid the Highlands’ spectacular scenery and whose descendants had fought fiercely since the turn of the century to preserve the views for themselves and the public. [John Cronin and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., The Riverkeepers,Scribner, 1997.]

Well-connected both in New York society and the editorial pages of the New York Times, Scenic Hudson began an opposition campaign that eventually engulfed the entire city. The battle to “Save Storm King” was the nation’s first great environmental crusade, becoming a legal landmark when the Federal District Court allowed Scenic Hudson to intervene on environmental grounds for the first time in history. The case is still cited. Several Scenic Hudson members went on to found the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Throughout the campaign Scenic Hudson insisted they were not opposed to electricity but only this particular way of generating it…What became obvious, however, was that at bottom they were opposed to everything. Industrial progress itself was the enemy…

What finally focused my attention on the aristocratic roots of environmentalism, however, was a chapter in Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class. Although the book is justly famous for coining “conspicuous consumption” and “conspicuous waste,” there is a lesser-known chapter entitled “Industrial Exemption” that perfectly describes the environmental zeitgeist. Veblen posed the question, why is it that people who are the greatest beneficiaries of industrial society are often the most passionate in condemning it? He provided a simple answer. People in the leisure class have become so accustomed affluence as the natural state of things that they no longer feel compelled to embrace any further industrial progress… [emphasis added]

My article generated 150 letters, including a response from a member of the Federal Power Commission who said that construction of new power plants wasn’t necessary. I was often criticized, however, for claiming only affluent people are concerned about the environment. The one response I ever got from the press was in the middle of Three Mile Island when National Public Radio called to ask, “What do you say about all those farmers worried about radiation? They’re not aristocrats, are they?”

But that was not the point. It is not that the average person is not concerned about the environment. Everyone weighs the balance of economic gain against a respect for nature. It is only the truly affluent, however, who can be concerned about the environment to the exclusion of everything else. Most people see the benefits of pipelines and power plants and admit they have to be built somewhere. Only in the highest echelons do we hear people say, “We don’t need to build any pipelines. We’ve already got enough energy. We can all sit around awaiting the day we live off wind and sunshine.” [emphasis added]

Environmentalists have spent decades trying to disguise these aristocratic roots, even from themselves. They work desperately to form alliances with labor unions and cast themselves as purveyors of “green jobs.” But the Keystone Pipeline has brought all this into focus. As Joel Kotkin writes in Forbes, Keystone is the dividing line of the “two Americas,” the knowledge-based elites of the East and West Coasts in their media, non-profit and academic homelands (where Obama learned his environmentalism) and the blue-collar workers of the Great In-Between laboring in agriculture, mining, manufacturing, power production and the exigencies of material life. [emphasis added]

It’s going to be very difficult to erase that line during the election.

Read it all here.

Obama: My Plan Makes Electricity Rates Skyrocket

Click here to view the embedded video.

Uploaded by BattleBornPAC on Mar 18, 2009
Barack Obama: “Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.” (January 2008)
http://www.BattleBornPAC.com

Update: Great minds think alike…

• Jeffrey Klein: Obama Preventing Our Catalyst to Exit Recession Now
  (h/t: Noisy Room)

  President Obama’s refusing to permit the Keystone XL Pipeline last week has nothing to do with “environmental concerns” arising from it crossing the Ogallala Aquifer, and everything to do with an even more sinister agenda that could keep the middle class in economic straits for a generation or more.

  First, he wants to keep [fossil fuel] energy prices high, according to Thomas J. Pyle, CEO of the American Energy Alliance, in his January 20, 2012 FOXNews article.

  “The reality at the White House has nothing to do with protecting the environment — it’s about reinforcing a myth of energy scarcity on the United States and driving up the price of energy…

  Read it all here.

• Sultan Knish: Food Fights and Class Warfare
  

  …Conspicuous conservationism has made America a poorer country, destroyed millions of jobs and outsourced them overseas. Now it’s beginning to make America a hungrier country. In a moment of horrifying tone deafness that makes Marie Antoinette seem enlightened, the left is cheering that fewer Americans are eating meat, without seeming to understand that it’s because fewer Americans are able to afford it because of their economic policies.

  What the left’s food police can’t accomplish with nudges and shaming, they can finish off with policies and regulations that end up raising the price of food or by making it too difficult to sell. As the left tries and fails to sell the general public on conservation as a status symbol, it moves in the heavy bureaucratic artillery.

  It isn’t unusual for elites to use the legal system to enforce their own values on the general public, though it was the kind of thing that the universal franchise was supposed to put a leash on, but there is something grim about their growing preoccupation with the habits and mortality of the population. It’s the kind of concern that has a habit of ending in eugenics and the more medicine is universalized, the easier it is to start cutting off access to medical treatment for those who haven’t been nudged far enough in the right direction.

  Social medicine politicizes food consumption and a globalized economy politicizes food production. And the politicized American plate has less on it and at a higher price. While the left obsessively pursues its mission of destroying fast food in the name of lowering social medicine costs and being fairer to farmers, what they are truly accomplishing is to take affordable and filling food off the shelves, as they have done with countless other products that they have targeted.

  By the time the left was done with Russia, it had gone from a wheat producer to a wheat importer and many basic food staples were hard to come by even in a country filled with collective farms. Finding modern day examples of that isn’t hard. We only have to look as far south as Venezuela to see empty store shelves under the weight of government food policies. But one day that may be the local grocery store if the left gets its way.

  Read it all here.

• Angelo M. Codevilla: America’s Ruling Class – and the Perils of Revolution
  

  As over-leveraged investment houses began to fail in September 2008, the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties, of major corporations, and opinion leaders stretching from the National Review magazine (and the Wall Street Journal) on the right to the Nation magazine on the left, agreed that spending some $700 billion to buy the investors’ “toxic assets” was the only alternative to the U.S. economy’s “systemic collapse.” In this, President George W. Bush and his would-be Republican successor John McCain agreed with the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama. Many, if not most, people around them also agreed upon the eventual commitment of some 10 trillion nonexistent dollars in ways unprecedented in America. They explained neither the difference between the assets’ nominal and real values, nor precisely why letting the market find the latter would collapse America. The public objected immediately, by margins of three or four to one.

  When this majority discovered that virtually no one in a position of power in either party or with a national voice would take their objections seriously, that decisions about their money were being made in bipartisan backroom deals with interested parties, and that the laws on these matters were being voted by people who had not read them, the term “political class” came into use. Then, after those in power changed their plans from buying toxic assets to buying up equity in banks and major industries but refused to explain why, when they reasserted their right to decide ad hoc on these and so many other matters, supposing them to be beyond the general public’s understanding, the American people started referring to those in and around government as the “ruling class.” And in fact Republican and Democratic office holders and their retinues show a similar presumption to dominate and fewer differences in tastes, habits, opinions, and sources of income among one another than between both and the rest of the country. They think, look, and act as a class.

  Although after the election of 2008 most Republican office holders argued against the Troubled Asset Relief Program, against the subsequent bailouts of the auto industry, against the several “stimulus” bills and further summary expansions of government power to benefit clients of government at the expense of ordinary citizens, the American people had every reason to believe that many Republican politicians were doing so simply by the logic of partisan opposition. After all, Republicans had been happy enough to approve of similar things under Republican administrations. Differences between Bushes, Clintons, and Obamas are of degree, not kind. Moreover, 2009-10 establishment Republicans sought only to modify the government’s agenda while showing eagerness to join the Democrats in new grand schemes, if only they were allowed to. Sen. Orrin Hatch continued dreaming of being Ted Kennedy, while Lindsey Graham set aside what is true or false about “global warming” for the sake of getting on the right side of history. No prominent Republican challenged the ruling class’s continued claim of superior insight, nor its denigration of the American people as irritable children who must learn their place. The Republican Party did not disparage the ruling class, because most of its officials are or would like to be part of it.

  Never has there been so little diversity within America’s upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time America’s upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another. Few had much contact with government, and “bureaucrat” was a dirty word for all. So was “social engineering.” Nor had the schools and universities that formed yesterday’s upper crust imposed a single orthodoxy about the origins of man, about American history, and about how America should be governed. All that has changed.

  Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters — speaking the “in” language — serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America’s ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.

  Read it all here.

The Mainstream Media Buries Every Negative Story about Barack Hussein Obama

They’ll bury it and they’ll keep it buried, even when they have all of the proof on video. Under the US Constitution, our free press has the right (and, arguably, the duty) to expose public as well as private wrongdoing. Instead, our mainstream media organizations have become consolidated into a small, closed, wealthy clique that opposes and flouts the beliefs and values of most of its audience. They support and protect hard-left/pro-jihadi/radical-environmental (“red-green-green”) politicians and causes – especially Obama and his policies – while trying its hardest to clear the GOP field of any conservative strong enough to unseat him.

What story is being buried? It’s Barack and Michelle Obama’s longtime association and close friendship with former PLO operative and rabid anti-Semite, Rashid Khalidi.

American Thinker: A GOP Candidate’s Bitter Ex-Wife Receives More Coverage Than a Video of Obama Dining with Terrorist-Supporters

(h/t: Diane)

By Lauri B. Regan
[...]
However, of greater importance in my view is the silence, save for a few journalists and pundits on the right, regarding exposing a videotape recorded in 2003 of Barack Obama at the farewell dinner for terrorist-supporting Palestinian Rashid Khalidi. News of the videotape’s existence came to light while Obama was a candidate, and the free pass given to him by the mainstream media was only just beginning to come to light when the enamored Chris Matthews’ shared news of the tingle up his leg.
[...]
But there is a videotape sitting in the vaults of the Los Angeles Times, and every American should be screaming from the rooftops for its release.  In light of the Arab Spring, Obama’s endless attempts to bully Israel into succumbing to all sorts of unprecedented and unsafe demands in the hopes that he would go down in history as the POTUS who made peace between the Israelis and Palestinians, and the administration’s ineptness in addressing Iran’s nuclear program and military threats, exposing this videotape is of utmost importance.

In April 2010, Roger L. Simon published an article on PajamasMedia entitled, “Why is the L.A. Times Burying the Obama/Khalidi Tape?”  Of further consequence is why the media — and Americans — are not demanding that the L.A. Times immediately release the tape.  Simon wrote:

The Khalidi tape could be of tremendous significance in revealing the provenance of Obama’s views on the Middle East and the degree to which the public was misled on those views during the presidential campaign[.] …

So what are we to think? We have an administration that not only ascribes most of the Middle East blame to Israel, but also has banned “Islamism” and all related words, even “Islam” and “jihad” from our national security documents. They’re completely gone. Indeed, even the Fort Hood massacre, so clearly inspired by Islamic extremism, has now been shifted into the comfortable category of the lone, angry killer. Rashid Khalidi should be happy. And, in fact, he is.

Sometimes I want to yell and scream. What is wrong with the Los Angeles Times? Are they a news organization or the propaganda wing of some leftover unit of the IWW? No wonder subscribers are deserting them in droves.

While I am sure that Simon’s questions were rhetorical, I will answer the obvious.  Of course the paper is a propaganda tool.  Were it not for the internet and cable television, true news organizations would no longer exist.  It was recently reported that Jerusalem Post editor Steve Linde quoted Bibi Netanyahu calling The New York Times and Haaretz Israel’s two main enemies because “they set the agenda for an anti-Israel campaign all over the world.”  Netanyahu denies making this exact statement, but there is no question that both papers’ reporting reflects a bias that can be characterized only as anti-Israel propaganda.  Taken a step further, there is no question that the mainstream media as a whole has become completely entrenched in propaganda, bias, anti-Israel and anti-American sentiment, and indoctrination based on liberal, progressive values that are completely out of the “mainstream.”

The public will never understand that the Islamists taking over the Mideast are not moderate, will not promote democracy, are not friends of the United States, and wish the ultimate destruction of the West if the public reads and relies upon only The New York Times, L.A. Times, MSNBC, or similar tools of the left for its “news” and information.  Americans will not understand the implications of four more years of a pro-Islamist president if they do not understand what Islamism is all about.  And they will not know who is sitting in the White House making policy decisions based on personal biases if the media continues to promote Obama’s agenda rather than investigate and report.

So why is the videotape of such paramount importance?  Simon quotes from an article published in the L.A.Times discussing the tape and its contents:

[A] young Palestinian American recited a poem accusing the Israeli government of terrorism in its treatment of Palestinians and sharply criticizing U.S. support of Israel. If Palestinians cannot secure their own land, she said, “then you will never see a day of peace.”

One speaker likened “Zionist settlers on the West Bank” to Osama bin Laden, saying both had been “blinded by ideology.”

Furthermore, rumors abound regarding additional messages that may or may not have been openly shared at the dinner in Obama’s presence.  Ted Belman reported at Israpundit that he has a reliable source that “the audio tape clearly picks up the toast ‘death to Israel’.”  Did Obama drink to the death of an American ally that he has been actively intimidating, browbeating, and dissing since he phoned Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on his first day in office?  Does Obama liken Israelis living in the West Bank to Osama bin Laden, whose death he claims as his greatest foreign policy accomplishment?

Simon concluded his article with a request that readers send in suggestions on how to make the contents of the tape public.  Apparently Donald Trump missed this request when he wasted the media’s energy pushing for the release of Obama’s birth certificate — something with which Obama is still having fun as he mocked the birthers at the Golden Globe awards last week.

But I highly doubt that the POTUS, who had his worldview formed while sitting in the pews of Israel-bashing Jeremiah Wright and at the dinner table of anti-Semite Khalidi, will be mocking people who care enough to properly vet his credentials by urging the release of the tape.  And I venture a guess that if the videotape is released, Barack Obama will be packing his bags at the end of this year.  But that is a big “if” because until the media stops obsessing over the infidelities of the GOP candidates and starts doing its job, Barack Obama’s chances of a second term continue to scare the living daylights out of those who understand its implications.

Read it all here.

Pay To Play

Mitt Romney’s organization contributed to GOP candidates in 2010 to buy their endorsements in 2012. That means everyone who ran in 2010 as a Tea Party candidate and then endorsed Mitt Romney in 2012 is a sellout, a political prostitute, a turncoat, and a fraud.

And that’s just the beginning.

Not Romney

(h/t: no2liberals)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Uploaded by shellymic on Jan 17, 2012

***WARNING – SOME FOUL LANGUAGE***
http://nebraskattitude.blogspot.com/2012/01/not-romney-video.html

If you still support Mitt after watching this, you should be stripped of your right to vote.

Conservatives will not vote for this FRAUD. Anyone who thinks that the FRAUD that is Willard “Mitt” Romney is a Conservative, is ignorant. TEA Partiers who ever supported this FRAUD should be embarrassed by their support of him. You are not a TEA Partier if you vote for Mitt.

Mitt should not be president. Ever. No matter how bad he wants to be.

Ann Barnhardt is the gal in the video. She was the driving force behind the making of this video.
Here’s the link to her original video: Barnhardt – Romney Go Home
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBXe3Kvg-qU (41,175 views as of right now.)
Ann Barnhardt’s YouTube Channel:
http://www.youtube.com/user/AnnBarnhardt
Ann’s Blog:
http://barnhardt.biz/
About Ann:
“‘Going Galt’: Hedge Broker Shuts Down Firm With Chilling Letter About The Market”
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/going-galt-hedge-broker-shuts-down-firm-with-…
[...]
Get to Know Mitt Romney
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJzrZX528nQ
PROOF: Mitt Romney Is As Liberal As OBAMA!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1fThdWagJ4
Romney vs. Romney on Campaign Finance Reform
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCyYStcXEfw
Report: Short-Lived Firm Dissolves After $1 Million Pro-Romney Donation
http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2011/08/04/138989269/report-short-liv…
Firm gives $1 million to pro-Romney group, then dissolves
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44011308/#.TxELKm9STux
35 Romney endorsers received contributions first
http://www.salon.com/2012/01/07/35_romney_endorsers_received_contributions_fi…
2 more fake companies donated millions to Romney
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/08/05/1003620/-2-more-fake-companies-donat…
2 Utah companies donate $1 million apiece to Romney PAC
http://www.fox13now.com/news/local/kstu-mitt-romney-2-utah-companies-donate-1…
“WhichMitt” YouTube channel
(19 videos of Romney’s flip-flops over the years)
http://www.youtube.com/user/whichmitt
Sarah Palin’s Indianola, IA speech – full transcript:
http://conservatives4palin.com/2011/09/transcript-of-governor-palins-septembe…
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8Pg_1i53_Y
Get to Know Mitt Romney
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJzrZX528nQ
Ultimate Dog Tease
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGeKSiCQkPw
http://www.youtube.com/user/klaatu42
Randall’s Wild Wild World of Animals + CZG123
http://www.youtube.com/user/czg123
Tickling Slow Loris
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9f-6jygRJk
The OMG Cat
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_S5cXbXe-4
Bizkit the Sleep Walking Dog
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2BgjH_CtIA
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/
http://www.cato.org/
http://www.thebostonchannel.com/index.html
http://abcnews.go.com/
http://www.foxnews.com/
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/

Byron York: Final count could show Romney lost Iowa

(h/t: Flyovercountry)

Weasel Zippers: Report: Santorum Currently Up 80 Votes In Iowa Caucuses Ballot Count…

(h/t: waldensianspirit)

CzechRebel on 1389 Blog had it all figured out on January 6. Both of us noticed that something very fishy was going on that night. Problem is, even if the final vote certification shows Santorum, and not Romney, to be the actual winner in Iowa, Romney has already enjoyed a huge, undeserved, and artificial boost from having been prematurely declared the victor.