We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
In 1973, Nixon and Kissinger used South Vietnam as a tool to widen the split between China and the Soviet Union. In 2010, Islamists, Iran and other Muslim states use the Obama administration as a tool to split the US from Israel.
Most of us who are still aghast at the Democrat controlled US Congress dooming South Vietnam to fall by cutting off promised arms and air support necessary to its survival also criticized Nixon and Kissinger for walking into the duplicitous trap of the Peace Accords of 1973.The North Vietnamese rulers had a long, documented history of promising one thing while doing another.
However, Nixon and Kissinger had a bigger game afoot, to reduce tensions with China for our purpose of widening its rift from the Soviet Union, which added pressure on the Soviet Union.
In effect, South Vietnam was a tool to what they had good reasons to believe was a bigger, more important end.Surely, neither Nixon nor Kissinger expected Nixon’s Watergate downfall and the left Democrats to sweep to Congressional power.
There’s a difference now.
Obama and Clinton may be thinking they are using Israel as a tool to cuddle up to long and continually intransigent Arab states. But they are actually tools themselves of those who seek nothing else than the downfall of Israel and the retreat of the US from confronting their clear goals of dominating the Middle East and, via its oil, Europe.
Obama and Clinton don’t deny the ongoing efforts of Iran in going nuclear or sending men and arms to those attacking US, Iraqi and Afghan troops, to Syria, Lebanon and Gaza. They just avoid the necessary countermeasures and march forward in repeatedly proven delusions of Iran changing its spots and of kumbaya as a replacement for reality.
Nixon and Kissinger had a world view realistically based on US interests furthering a world order of surer peace.Obama and Clinton, fully consciously or not, have a world view based on US interests being a barrier to a world order of peace, that ignores or excuses or refuses to confront the reality of foes’ unrelenting hate of the US and the West, encouraged by Obamanesque fecklessness.
Imagine if Ms. Romer had instead promised in 2009 that Congress could spend nearly $1 trillion, and 16 months later the unemployment rate would be nearly 10% and that more than 2.5 million additional Americans would be without jobs. Would Congress have still spent the cash? Well, sure, Congress will always spend what it can get away with, but the American public would have turned against the stimulus even faster than it has.
Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc said all deals with Israel are being evaluated.
"We are serious on this issue. New cooperation will not start and relations with Israel will be reduced," he said.
Energy Minister Taner Yildiz has said discussions about extending a Russian natural gas pipeline to Israel and providing fresh drinking water to Israel from the Manavgat river were being shelved.
The pro-Palestinian activists' deaths on the aid ship increased tensions in the Mideast, especially with Turkey, an important ally of Israel. On Thursday, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called Israel's actions "a historic mistake."
More sad stuff about Turkey, at Shrinkwrapped, who is interested in Islamic use of language. - especially hyperbole.
Hizbollah, Iran’s tool in Lebanon, is in virtual control of its government, armed with thousands of missiles from Iran directly and via Iran’s Syria conduit, the missiles able to reach all of Israel.
"Syria and Iran are providing Hezbollah with rockets and missiles of ever-increasing capability," he said at a joint news conference with his Israeli counterpart, Ehud Barak.
"And we're at a point now, where Hizbollah has far more rockets and missiles than most governments in the world, and this is obviously destabilizing for the whole region and we're watching it very carefully."
Hizbollah is encouraged by the hamstringing of Israel by the Obama administration and Israel’s allowing it in dealing with the Gaza blockade runners, coupled with the hypocritical outcry of international abettors and appeasers of Hamas.
If Israel has its way and does what’s necessary, Hizbollah should think twice before attacking Israel, unless Washington again tries to hobble Israel and Israel allows it.
Israel is focused on dealing a severe blow to Hizbollah.Defense News, a leading authoritative US publication on military matters, reports “Israel’s New Hard Line on Hizbollah.” Letting Lebanon, Hizbollah and the world know what’s in store is called deterrence, or stand-by-for-an-ass-whipping.
The last time war broke out along the Lebanese border, Israel acted clumsily and lost its aura of invincibility. If there is a next time, Israel's military brass vows, things will be different.
Under a strategy honed since the 2006 Lebanon war and rehearsed in microcosm in the late-2008 Gaza incursion, a new fight against Iranian- and Syrian-backed Hizbollah would see an all-out assault on the party's arsenals, command centers, commercial assets and strongholds throughout the country.
But it also would include attacks on national infrastructure; a total maritime blockade; and interdiction strikes on bridges, highways and other smuggling routes along the Syrian border with Syria. Meanwhile, land forces would execute a ferocious land grab well beyond the Litani River that Israeli brigades belatedly hobbled toward yet failed to reach in the last war….
In a May 23 interview, Gantz [IDF General Staff] warned that it could take repeated rounds of high-intensity wars to remove the Iranian-trained and financed threat from the north. The aim, he said, is to prolong the periods of relative quiet between war fighting.
"Israel cannot exist with protracted peaks of warfare," he said. "Therefore, we have to reduce them to reasonable levels - similar to the way we drove down terror in the aftermath of Defensive Shield [the IDF's 2002 operation in the West Bank]. That way, we allow our people to live reasonably under a protracted emergency situation until we fix it, and then we go back to square one.
"I doubt there will be peace afterwards, but at least we'll be able to extend the time between peaks ... Through strategic attrition - one round and then another round - we'll create a situation where each new round brings worse results than the last. And that, in and of itself, brings a formidable deterrent."
Here’s a video of tank defense technology that Israel is rapidly implementing:
No external effort can help Haiti, but this kind of BS is worse than help. Haiti needs jobs, then all else will follow. But it's so corrupt, nobody will place a factory there. And forget tourism to this hell-hole - unlike neighboring Dominican.
Win a soccer game by more than five points and you lose, Ottawa league says. Life is all about self-esteem, you know. Or is it self-love? This is a sickness.
All sides - the "critics" of Israel, her supporters, and everyone in between--agree that the "peace flotilla" affair is a disaster for Israel. I disagree. I say it is a victory for Israel, for truth, and for civilization in its eternal war against barbarism. The affair has not discredited Israel, but its "critics." It has made it plain beyond a shadow of doubt that the "critics" are in reality remorseless enemies who deny Israel the right to exist, as shown by the fact that they have portrayed Israel's perfectly legitimate and necessary act of self-defense as a crime against humanity. The "critics" have thus uncovered the truth about themselves and can no longer credibly deny it: that they are not high-minded humanitarians but allies of Hamas in its jihadist war of extermination against the Jewish state.
I like to see all kids working at crappy jobs like I did. This does not bode well for America's future:
The US pressured Israel for, in effect, a cover-up demanded by Turkey of exactly who are all the blockade runners. No one even knows the names or the affiliations of many of the passengers on the ships that tried to run the blockade of Gaza.All, except a few Israeli-Arabs, have been released by Israel.
Why? The US persuaded Israel to release all quickly, to appease Turkey.
Gerald Seib writes in the Wall Street Journal on US “mediation” between Israeli and Turkish officials:
Ultimately, the mediation succeeded in ending what had emerged as the most immediate cause of rising tensions: the detention in Israel of hundreds of Turkish citizens who formed the bulk of the pro-Palestinian activists removed from the ships….
Meantime, Mr. Obama also called an angry Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The conversation showed that the Israeli-Turkish relationship was in bad shape, but also that the burning issue for Turkey was winning the rapid release of several hundred Turkish citizens who had been taken off the ships by Israeli soldiers. "The immediate tourniquet that could be put on this arterial bleed, if you want, had to do with getting the Turkish citizens home," Gen. Jones said….
Mr. Netanyahu's government agreed to quickly clear an internal legal hurdle that was standing in the way of an immediate release: It persuaded the country's supreme court to deny appeals by some Israeli groups calling for charges to be pressed against those taken off the ships.
The result:
UAE TVreports of those sent to Jordan: “…126 international activists arrived in Jordan….The International activists received an official and public welcome….”
Three planes carrying nearly 500 activists from the Gaza aid flotilla arrived in Istanbul early on Thursday, and were welcomed by a crowd of supporters, many of whom waved Palestinian flags and shouted anti-Israel slogans....
Most of the activists were Turkish, but participants from at least 38 different nations were also involved, including Israelis, Palestinians and more than 100 Europeans….Turkey's deputy prime minister, Bulent Arinc [says] "Israel will be asked within the framework of laws to pay for the murders it has committed," [and] Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called for Israel to be punished for what he called "state terrorism."
That’s the thanks Israel gets for acceding to Washington.
BTW, no not really by the way but central to understanding the whys of the snafu at sea, I’m still waiting for journalists or insiders to reveal, those who care enough and have the integrity to know and report, about the “explosive question”to find out exactly what the Obama administration told Israel "through multiple channels, many times" before the raid on the ships about being restrained, as the US State Department spokesman admitted to the Washington Post, and what exactly those in the Netanyahu administration did about it, that may have contributed to the snafu at sea.
There's shame deserved in Washingtom and Jerusalem for expecting thanks or constructive results for self-hobbling. Make the facts public. If citizens of Israel are expected to die in defense of their country, or be killed for just being in Israel, and if the US is expected to be useful for peace instead of a useful tool for enemies of the US and Israel, we all deserve to know, now.
PowerLine links to my earlier post, "EXPLOSIVE Question" (link to it above). There are now two instances known of Obama administration pressure on Israel to, in effect, commit "suicide." When will the major media start demanding to know all the facts, in Washington and in Jerusalem, of these and other instances and when will some brave soul come clean?
Turkey Hash: The Turkish Prime Minister says, “I do not think that Hamas is a terrorist organization." He also says "the Ten Commandments prohibits Jews from killing." Actually, it says "murder." Perhaps he should talk to his Hamas buddies, eh?
“One of the reasons people like myself are willing to put our heads above the parapet is that our careers are not at risk from being labelled a denier or flat-Earther because we say the science is not settled. The bullying of people into silence has unfortunately been effective.”
In the past few weeks, this European democratic socialist worker's paradise has been revealed to be a fraud, a sleight of hand, a pipe dream, an exercise in rank denial and living beyond your means.
And when you deny reality, by pretending that you can live beyond your means forever and a day, then reality is going to come back to bite you.
Everyone knows that the great European social democratic experiment has failed.
Here's our request to our regular and/or irregular readers:
As summer begins in the northern hemisphere, people tend to find better things to do than to read websites. That is good. However, here at Maggie's the steadily-growing readership is our only compensation for our (enjoyable and self-educating and sometimes simply therapeutic) effort and time.
We know we are not to everyone's taste, but there are tons of folks out there who might enjoy our eclectic site if they knew we existed. If you have not done so already, do us a favor and introduce us to your friends, neighbors, relatives, colleagues, enemies, etc. (It used to be called "viral marketing," but before that it was called "word of mouth.")
Thanks, from the Maggie's Team.
PS: Dr. Merc reminds me to remind you to not be shy, and send us comments when you have them.
The link has several illuminating videos as well as the reports.I won’t use up bandwidth or delay it loading on your end by presenting the videos or reports.If any are interested in the hard facts, please go to the site and see for yourself, including why much of the commentary and suggestions offered by armchair generals and ignorant politicians are dangerous illusions and hogwash, indeed further the aims of Israel and the West's enemies. Security is the object of diplomacy, not to be compromised or sacrificed for "process" or photo-ops that avoid the core issues.
The real picture of the O at the Louisiana beach, above. That's a real news photo, but the widely-distributed image was just a posed propaganda shot for the sycophantic media. "Message: I care."
“The New York Times and Newsweek can’t figure out a profitable business model in the Internet age. We propose the government step in with all means at its disposal to limit competition to these print media companies and create new government subsidies for their business. Once their companies’ profitability is absolutely dependent on these government mandates and subsidies, the Federal government will have a powerful source of leverage to protect itself from criticism in these outlets. Once we have this situation in place, we will have a strong inventive to quash more independent outlets and maximize the market share of media companies beholden to the government. In a large sense, our recommendations build off the success of the tobacco settlement experiment, where a few large companies agreed to pay the government large percentages of their future profits, and then the government worked diligently to quash new tobacco competitors to maximize the market share of those companies paying it settlement money.”
If these people had wanted humanitarian aid, Israel offered to take the ships into Haifa, peacefully, unload all the stuff inside and to allow all the humanitarian aid immediately into Gaza, all the food and medicine. And it was refused because it was meant to be a provocation and to create an incident.
Conservatives claim that government is incompetent, inefficient, and intrinsically corrupt (eg vote buying), and therefore can be trusted to do very little.
Libs and Lefties seem to believe that government is smarter and possessed of superior motives to those of the private sector.
When governments fail to demonstrate effectiveness (as in the IRS' failure to make money on a Nevada whorehouse, or the oil spill, or managing money, or border control, or Fannie and Freddie, or...), many Conservatives complain that government isn't doing its job with all our dough. Libs and Lefties complain that the failure will damage the notion of big government's omni-competence and virtue and thus their claim to our hard-earned dollars and pennies.
Readers know my view: Much of government is a legal racket, a special interest in itself devoted to its own interests of power and money and ego. Government has limited power against reality, and disproportionately more power over people's lives. Obama can no more control the oil spill than he can legislate the weather or the economy.
I am entirely in agreement with Steyn who we quoted this morning, "Almost every problem we face today arises from the vanity of Big Government."
I do not blame Obama for the oil (or the weather). I never rush to blame anybody for anything. Shit happens. However, government worshippers like Obama cannot say so because it would undermine the vision, which they market, of governmental godlike omnicompetence and virtue leading towards Progress and Worry-Free Life and General Wonderfulness. The Achilles' Heel of taking that position is that you must accept blame for almost anything that goes wrong.
Reality is relentless. Even if you control the media, reality wins in the end.
Photo: Thought you might want to see what a blowout preventer looks like. These are around 5 stories high, resemble space aliens, and cost around $10 million.
“Wow, three people who spend their lives opining about things and who have never run anything in their career fell for a guy who spent his life opining about things and who has never run anything in his career. Who’d a thunk it?”
The flow of oil may soon end, but the political and environmental fallout is just getting started. Newsweek
Virtually everywhere in the world outside the EU and Islamic countries which forbid Christian proselytization, Christianity is on the biggest roll in its 2000 year history. Both in absolute numbers of adherents and in terms of its global ‘market share’ (the percentage of the world’s population that professes the Christian faith), Christianity is at an all time high. In the last fifty years it has surpassed Islam both as the most popular religion in sub-Saharan Africa and as the leading Abrahamic religion in China. The Roman Catholic Church alone claims almost as many members as the total number of Sunni Muslims in the world; all told, Christianity claims almost twice as many adherents as Islam worldwide.
Let’s cut out the crap from the international sob-sisters and abetters of Gazan Hamas thugs. Let the UN Security Council show this video upon its big screen, and then choke on the hasty lies swallowed by puerile politicians of pusillanimity pontificating from far away, and the media that vomited the lies upon its viewers and readers. Those who say anything Israel did was disproportionate parrot the word on cue, without any sense of what it means, in definition or actuality.
There are only two things disproportionate: 1. Israelis were armed with paintball guns and did not use more force to quickly quell and control those violently prepared upon the Mavi Marmara. Instead, Israel, as usual restrained itself, while no such self-control was planned by or exerted upon those on the ship. 2. The usual crowd of sympathizers to terror and antagonists to self-defense knee-jerk echoing of clearly wrong, inane and antagonistic charges against Israel, even despite the clear evidence to the contrary.
The blockade of Gaza is to prevent war material from entering. It preserves the peace. The convoy was offered but refused to have its cargo inspected and if humanitarian transferred to Gaza.
The convoy was not humanitarian in intent or action.It was a blatant political propaganda ploy, intentionally belligerent in leadership, word and deed, to provoke in order to pressure Israel to commit suicide, opening Gaza’s borders to the type of infusion of deadly weapons and missiles for Hamas to attack Israel that flows unimpeded into Lebanon.
Any who defend the convoy or its passengers are actually furthering avoidable death and war.
P.S.: I'm just too angry to write more right now. My friend Bookie has a good roundup. She points us to this that if President Obama plays his usual games of currying favors, which are not returned by any to whom he has, he will speed and impel Israel to take its survival in its own hands. PowerLine also has proportionate sense to offer: don't "bring a toy gun to a knife fight." AllahPundit wonders about the immediate convening of the UN Security Council to condemn Israel, compared to it not meeting when North Korea torpedoed and sunk a South Korean ship. See Useful Idiots At Sea and other posts at Contentions.
It used to be said — the president before an election had to go to Ireland, Israel and Italy. Well, now it’s Jews, Hispanics, and gays if you are going into a midterm election...
It should be further noted that this tendency to project one’s own cultural norms of right and wrong onto others is the height of arrogance and ethnocentrism — precisely what liberals always warn against. Yet the irony is that “open-minded” proponents of cultural relativism and respect for “the other” are also the ones most prone to westernizing Islam. When Brennan insists that jihadists are really not motivated by religion but rather are products of “political, economic and social forces,” is his position — that jihadists are just like us, they just don’t know it yet — not the height of cultural arrogance?
I will be elsewhere for the next three days, but I want to deposit these droppings. Yes, I am remembering this weekend. My gratitude for those who have fought and died in the service of this country is endless.
RIP Les Lines. (h/t, NYM). I grew up with Lines' mag. Great stuff. Audubon Mag sucks now. BTW, Bodio's site has wonderfuo potential, but they do not post enough - especially given the size of their roster.
AVI wonders why it is so difficult to discuss issues with Liberals. His readers have some thoughts.
When I heard the story and saw the pics, it was clear to me that our Editor happily does the "jobs Americans won't do." Such as outdoor labor. Supposedly only illegal Mexicans will do that hard work.
Two months ago I posted a sign at the High School jobs bulletin board. It said "Yard, Garden, and Farm Work, through the season. $10/hr," and I gave my phone number. Unbelievably, given how hard it for kids to find jobs right now, I only received two replies, a guy and a gal. They have been doing chores for me on weekends, and will begin working 5 or 6 days/week until everything on my list is done. It will take at least into August. They are wonderful, do not mind heavy lifting or getting dirty, and tell me this job will get them buff and tan for their summer nights.
My list for them includes painting the shed and the barn and a garden fence, splitting wood for the fall (I won't let them do chain-sawing), weekly lawn mowing, clearing out some downed trees in the pasture, mucking the barn, putting up hay when it comes in, weeding the gardens, trimming hedges, edging borders, putting down mulch, re-setting a long slate walkway in stone dust, replacing some horse fence, cleaning the barn windows, rebuilding my garden compost bins, replacing or repairing a couple of gates and garden fences, etc. The Mrs. will give them lunch, and promises me that she will be demanding of them and will treat them formally, as employees and not like kids (which they do not seem to require thus far). It's much more work than I have time to do on weekends.
If they stick with it, it's worth $3-4,000 for each of them. A costly summer for me, but many of these jobs have been accumulating and need to get done now. Furthermore, it will give me more time for riding with the Mrs., which she very much appreciates even though I am no great fan of horses. Golf too.
Remind me to let you know how it works out, but so far, so good.
Humans: Why They Triumphed. How did one ape 45,000 years ago happen to turn into a planet dominator? The answer lies in an epochal collision of creativity.
“Vote yourself a home!” has been our national motto for the last fifty years and today Americans are as addicted to the home mortgage deduction (and the even less justifiable deductions for second mortgages and home equity loans) as Greeks are to early retirement and government employment. Political popularity makes the policies harder to change — but no less damaging and destructive.
Liberalism, as we have known it for decades, is on the defensive. With the welfare state unsustainable, it has nowhere to turn and its adherents are turning tail in every direction. They are mad and they are, in many cases, unmoored. Lifetime ideologies are beginning to crumble. Personality constructs are at risk.
My only meaningful disagreement might be that I do not see Rush's bragging as genuine, but as radio shtick. Nobody who says "I speak with half my brain tied behind my back, just to keep it fair" is a serious braggart.
I think what drives Lefties nuts about Rush (besides his opinions) are his cheerfulness, infectious optimism, fair-handedness and kindness with callers, and his regular-American (as opposed to elite American) points of view.
The lack of angst and anger is simply not fashionable and is, indeed, repugnant to the elite Liberal mind.
More on 
Photo: An 
Photo: Why there was no looting in Nashville during the flood (it's an old photo, but you get the idea) h/
Photo: Thought you might want to see what a blowout preventer looks like. These are around 5 stories high, resemble space aliens, and cost around $10 million.
Photo from Anchoress' 
I will be elsewhere for the next three days, but I want to deposit these droppings. Yes, I am remembering this weekend. My gratitude for those who have fought and died in the service of this country is endless.
AVI reflects on