World News

Saturday, August 14, 2010

Obama gives support to Ground Zero mosque during White House Ramadan feast

creeping | August 14, 2010 at 7:19 AM | Tags: 9/11, Barack Obama, Creeping Sharia, dhimmi, islam, Life, Media, Muslim, New York, News, NYC, Obama, Politics, Random, Religion, Sharia, terrorism, travel | Categories: Alerts, Creeping Sharia, Media, Mosque, New York, News, Obama, Politics, Religion, Sharia, Stealth Jihad | URL: http://wp.me/pbU4v-6nk

Islamic prayers every Friday in the Capitol building. Ramadan feast Friday night at the White House. Wasn't building a shrine to conquering America mosque at Ground Zero supposed to be a local issue? Ever the opportunist, Obama chose his Islamic feast with Muslims at the White House celebrating the month of jihad to endorse the [...]

Dining Out In The World

Have fun! Let's see how smart you are!

Just click on "Dining Out In The World" below, then select your answer by clicking on the twirling utensil. It will give you the correct answer, then move to the next country. [There are 11 countries.] Its funny and hard...............

Dining Out In The World

=

The War Party's New Torchlight Parade

Thursday, August 12, 2010
The War Party's New Torchlight Parade

Contrived Controversy: Protesting the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque."

The most powerful patron of radical Islam is not Iran, Iraq, or Saudi Arabia. It is the government headquartered in Washington, D.C., which for more than a half-century has diligently cultivated Islamic terrorism. Yet millions of Americans are suffering what amounts to a collective loss of bladder control over the purported threat embodied in the proposed Cordoba House -- the Islamic equivalent of a YMCA -- in New York City.

Allowing the "Ground Zero Mosque" to be built, insists Newt Gingrich, would be tantamount to "surrender" in a struggle against those implacably committed to our destruction. New York gubernatorial hopeful Carl Paladino, a New York crony capitalist who anointed himself a paladin of the Tea Party movement, has made opposition to the "Ground Zero Mosque" the central plank of his campaign. Paladino, who has profited handsomely from government's redistribution of wealth, promises that if elected he will confiscate the property used for the Muslim Community Center through eminent domain and use the land to erect a war memorial.

Writing in National Review, former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy insists that Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf -- the Kuwait-born U.S. citizen who leads the Cordoba Initiative -- is pursuing a "stealth jihad" as a fellow-traveler of the Muslim Brotherhood. "The Ground Zero project is a test of America's resolve to face down a civilizational jihad that that aims, in the words of its leaders, to destroy us from within," maintains McCarthy.

According to Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association (AFA) the problem isn't the proposal to build a Muslim cultural center two blocks from Ground Zero. Rather, it's the fact that the government ruling us permits the existence of mosques anywhere in the United States.

Since "every single mosque is a potential terror training center or recruiting center for jihad," Muslims "cannot claim First Amendment Protections," maintains Fischer (who, in addition to supporting case-specific abolition of the First Amendment, has previously called for the abolition of the habeas corpus guarantee as well).

Rather than focusing exclusively on the so-called Ground Zero Mosque, the AFA and like-minded organizations have instigated a nation-wide campaign to protest construction of Muslim houses of worship in more than a half-dozen states. Like McCarthy, Fischer treats Imam Rauf as an asset of the Muslim Brotherhood, which (according to Fischer) is "at the heart and center... the soul of Islam in America."

Here's a quick digest of the charges leveled by Fischer, which are typical of this manufactured controversy:

Islamic houses of worship serve as recruiting centers for soldiers of jihad, who will kill and die on behalf of Sharia Law. Many Islamic clerics, including Imam Feisal, are joined at the hip with the Muslim Brotherhood -- the most powerful element of the international Islamic terrorist network.

Jihadist at work? Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf (right).

Stipulating that those concerns are genuine, and that the proper course of action would be to target the greatest offenders first, the campaign to shut down the global jihad should target the United States Government -- and the Republican-dominated Evangelical Churches that serve as military recruiting stations for the Regime in Washington.

During the past decade, a Middle Eastern nation of roughly 30,000,000 people once ruled by a secular government succumbed to Sharia Law. The predictable results of that catastrophe included a dramatic increase in religious violence, such as the persecution of professional women whose dress and conduct are now seen as unacceptable. More than half of the Christian population of that country -- which includes congregations tracing their roots back to the original disciples -- was driven into exile.

That nation is Iraq, which suffered for decades under Washington's loathsome subcontractor Saddam Hussein before Saddam's employer decided to remove the middleman.

For a dozen years after the 1991 Gulf War -- which followed the Washington-instigated Iraqi assault on Kuwait, which itself was a sequel to the Washington-abetted Iraqi war with Iran -- the country was suffocated by a murderous embargo punctuated with the occasional terror-bombing. After being softened up for more than a decade, Iraq was invaded and occupied by U.S. troops who killed and died in order to install an Islamist government whose new constitution formally enshrines Sharia Law.

When American jingoists offer misty-eyed tributes to the soldiers who died in the course of "liberating" Iraq, it could be said that they are, in effect, praising the efforts of men and women who are martyrs to the cause of Sharia Law.

This outcome is not an historical anomaly. For the past six decades, the Anglo-American elite (with Washington assuming the senior partner role after World War II) has assiduously promoted the most violent strains of revolutionary Islam, often -- but not exclusively -- as a strategic weapon in the context of the Cold War.

Professional revolutionary: Afghani.

The Muslim Brotherhood -- which grew out of the late-19th Century agitation of Persian-born professional revolutionary Jamal Eddine al-Afghani -- has long been one of the Anglo-American elite's most important strategic assets, as well as the talent pool that was used to staff the deadliest terrorist network in the Muslim world.

While he was superficially the most devout and pious of Muslim believers, Al-Afghani, writes Robert Dreyfuss in his valuable book The Devil's Game, "a heterodox thinker who was a Freemason, a mystic, a political operative, and above all ... someone who believed in the `social utility of religion.'"

After serving as a Russian agent in the 1860s, Afghani defected to the British. He was in London's employ when he made a disciple of an Egyptian Sugist named Mohammed Abduh.

During the 1870s, Afghani and Abduh used Cairo's storied Al-Azhar mosque as a recruiting center for a revolutionary network, which gathered cadres from throughout the Middle East and Europe. Afghani also founded a lodge of his Arab Masonic society, which became the headquarters of what Egyptian police called "young Thugs" -- a description invoking India's notorious Thugee Cult, an oath-bound fraternity of murderers.

When Afghani was eventually expelled from Egypt, his disciple Abduh remained, eventually rising to become the nation's Mufti (supreme interpreter of Islamic law) in 1899. Like his mentor, Abduh considered revolution to be his religion, and the Islamic faith to be a vessel for his political ambitions. Among those who fell under Abduh's influence was Hassan Al-Banna, the schoolteacher who gave tangible form to Abduh's revolutionary designs by founding the Ikhwan al-Mulimeen (Islamic Brotherhood) in 1928.

Disciple and organizer: Abduh.

Reflecting the influence of Afghani and Abduh, Banna organized the Brotherhood into cells (called "families") of five to seven members.

The Brotherhood "was more than a movement," writes Dreyfuss. "It was a cult, it was a revivalist party, it was an intelligence operation, it was a paramilitary unit, and it was an international organization that was rapidly building branches in many Middle Eastern countries." During World War II, Dreyfuss continues, Brotherhood cadres were recruited by British, Nazi, and Soviet intelligence agencies.

"In the eastern regions of the Soviet empire, where the Nazis were more interested in oil than ethnic cleansing, the Third Reich mobilized Muslims and other ethnic minorities to fight for the liberation of their homelands," writes Eliza Griswold in The New Republic, summarizing the findings in Ian Johnson's recent book A Mosque in Munich. "The Nazis plucked Muslims from German prisoner-of-war camps; some Muslims became German soldiers, members of the SS; some, professional propagandists.... Once World War II ended, many of these men, stuck in Germany and having lost their homelands, found a new employer: the United States."

Brotherhood founder al-Banna.

A CIA-created propaganda arm called Radio Liberty employed "many of these former Nazi sympathizers," Griswold points out. In 1953 -- the same year the CIA and MI6, working through a network of Islamic radicals, brought down the Iranian government of Mohammed Mossadegh -- the White House hosted 27-year-old Said Ramadan, the Muslim Brotherhood's chief international organizer in addition to being son-in-law to Hassan al-Banna's son-in-law, who had been assassinated in 1949.

In subsequent years, many adherents of the Brotherhood -- including former Nazi sympathizers who worked with the CIA -- affiliated with the Al-Quds Mosque in Munich. Among them was Mahmoud Abouhalima, a Brotherhood member who became a leader in the CIA-funded Afghan mujahadeen and later played a prominent role in the 1993 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.

Abouhalima, who spent the late 1980s networking with radicals among American Muslims, sponsored the 1990 visit of Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, later convicted of "seditious conspiracy" in the 1993 WTC attack. Despite being on a State Department terrorist watch list, Sheik Omar was granted a visa at the U.S. consulate in Khartoum: As something other than coincidence had it, the CIA station chief personally attended to the matter by substituting for the consular official who was usually in charge of issuing visas.

Ike and Ikhwan: Brotherhood leader Said Ramadan is at the far right, holding papers.

Like practically everyone else involved in the 1993 WTC plot, Omar had also been an asset of the U.S. Government. The same is true of former U.S. Army Special Forces Captain Ali Mohammed, who -- according to investigators -- most likely "called the shots" in the bombing conspiracy. Despite -- or perhaps because of -- that fact, Mohammed went on to become a "privileged asset" of the FBI.

In 2001, Mohammed pleaded guilty -- "in exchange for considerations" -- to charges arising from the 1998 bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. He then disappeared into the witness protection program, where he remains to this day.

The extent to which the Muslim Brotherhood is (in Bryan Fischer's phrase) "the soul of Islam in America" reflects the tireless efforts of our rulers to nurture radical Islam as a strategic asset -- both for prosecuting war abroad and making war on us at home by terrorizing us into supporting its corrupt, needlessly bellicose foreign policy.

In his eagerness to strip American citizens who profess the Muslim religion of their rights, Bryan Fischer offers an analogy to the recent arrest of the so-called Hutaree Militia in Michigan on charges of seditious conspiracy. "The fact that they were a Christian militia did not stop them from being locked up," Fischer told an interviewer.

Had his research into the Hutaree case been more exhaustive than scanning headlines, Fischer may have discovered that the rapidly disintegrating case against that group was built entirely on the claims made by an informant-provocateur employed by the FBI. The same is true of practically every recent "terrorism" case involving American Muslims.

If there is reason to be suspicious of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, it would not be his sensible criticism of Washington's foreign policy; instead, it would be his willingness to cooperate with the FBI, which seems more interested in manufacturing "terrorist plots" than interdicting them.

Not having access to his unspoken plans and motives, I cannot say whether Imam Rauf is sincere or duplicitous in his efforts to encourage mutual respect and understanding among people of different faiths. However, I am impressed by the answer he gave in 2006 when asked what his "Ramadan wish" would be for the world:

"[I would wish that] we would remember that the two greatest commandments that God gave us through the mouths of his many prophets and messengers, including Jesus, Moses, and Mohammed -- to love the Lord our God and to love our neighbors. It also means do not do unto others what you do not want others to do unto you. If that can be the criterion of our foreign policy, I guarantee you that our foreign policy will be successful and wildly popular."

As the treatment given to its Author demonstrates, preaching the Golden Rule will always provoke the murderous hostility of the ruling elite. Apparently, the last thing many American Christians can abide is the spectacle of an American Muslim leader who -- whatever else he may be up to -- insists that we abide by the central moral tenet of the Christian faith.

http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2010/08/war-partys-new-torchlight-parade.html

A Double-Dip Recession

"First, who are "we"? Congress? Second, did the 2009 stimulus of $787 billion focus on creating jobs? If so, where are they? Third, how does Federal spending create jobs? Hiring part-time census workers, yes. Creating a few thousand "shovel-ready" make-work jobs that cost small fortunes per job, yes. But sustained job recovery? It isn't happening."

A Double-Dip Recession
by Gary North

Promoting a revamped Keynesian economic theory – one without any guarantee of job growth – is the equivalent of selling a lifetime subscription to a revamped Playboy: one without any photos. It's a tough sell. Yet this is what Keynesians are facing today. This will be fun to watch.

In the last few days, we have begun to see reports from mainstream Keynesian forecasters and economists who are talking about the possibility of a double-dip recession.

For a year, we have been assured by experts that double-dip recessions are rare. They surely are. The last one was in Carter's final year, 1980 – which is why it was his final year – and Reagan's first year, 1981. As far as the National Bureau of Economic Research has reported, that was the only double-dip recession. The NBER is the unofficial arbiter of each recession's chronology.

A few forecasters a year ago predicted the ever-popular V-shaped economic recovery. They are all hoping that no one remembers. There is no one left standing who predicts anything like this. The economy has barely grown over the last year, and the most recent report from the government is that growth was slower than initially reported for the second quarter of this year.

This remains the mainstream consensus: no double-dip recession, but weak economic growth and slow job growth. A few forecasters have said that unemployment will in fact increase. I have, but I am not in the mainstream.

The mainstream says that we are in a jobless recovery. But this assessment does not convey the uniqueness of the last 12 months. The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis has posted an interactive chart that lets us compare the job non-recovery of the recession that began in late 2007 with all of the post-World War II recessions. We can click a box and get a different colored line for each recession-recovery. Only the double-dip recession of 1980–81 was worse in terms of the duration of unemployment.

In another sense, we are in the mother of all jobless recoveries: median unemployment longer than 27 weeks. As of July 2010, the number of unemployed Americans was 14.6 million, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Of these, 45% had been unemployed for over 27 weeks: 6.6 million people. This figure is unprecedented. Remember also that "unemployed" refers to people without jobs who are still looking for jobs. Those who give up and stop looking are no longer counted as unemployed.

Until the most recent meeting of the Federal Reserve System's Federal Open Market Committee, the press releases began with an affirmation of the increasing strength of the economy – slow but visible. The press release for August 10 began with this uncharacteristic pessimism: "Information received since the Federal Open Market Committee met in June indicates that the pace of recovery in output and employment has slowed in recent months."

In response to this intra-day press release, the Dow Jones Industrial Average recovered from a negative 120 to a negative 55, as the result of a meaningless statement that the FOMC will re-invest net payments from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bonds in Treasury bonds. This meant, at best, no change in the monetary base. The media greeted this as a major change in FED policy. It wasn't. The next day, the Dow fell 265 points.

SEEDS OF DOUBT

The financial media are beginning to report statements from Establishment forecasters who are saying that a double-dip recession is looking more likely. One of the most prominent of them is Yale economist Robert Shiller. He is the co-creator of the Case-Shiller monthly report on the residential housing prices in 20 American cities. He also coined the phrase "irrational exuberance." He now thinks the odds favoring a double dip are above 50–50. He says that the job market is the problem.

He is a Keynesian. So, he calls on Congress to spend lots more money on another deficit-funded stimulus. He says that the Federal Reserve is "out of bullets." Economists rarely say this about the FED. When they do, it indicates near-panic. He assures us that "If we focus on creating jobs, it's not as expensive as you might think."

First, who are "we"? Congress? Second, did the 2009 stimulus of $787 billion focus on creating jobs? If so, where are they? Third, how does Federal spending create jobs? Hiring part-time census workers, yes. Creating a few thousand "shovel-ready" make-work jobs that cost small fortunes per job, yes. But sustained job recovery? It isn't happening.

David Stockman, who was briefly Reagan's budget director before he resigned, recently wrote an article on the gargantuan size of the Federal deficit. He made an important but neglected observation. Ever since the third quarter of 2008, the nation's nominal GDP has increased by a tiny $100 billion, but the Federal debt has increased by 25 times the GDP increase.

This means that the hoped-for stimulus has not worked. It has taken $25 of Federal deficits to produce $1 of GDP growth. This marks a major anomaly for Keynesian economic theory. The justification for government deficits in Keynesian theory is that government spending restores economic growth. Money spent by the private sector does not increase economic growth in a recession; government spending does. This has never made any economic sense, but now the non-response of the economy is exposing this original nonsense for what it always was: nonsense. The Federal deficit is skyrocketing, but the economy has barely increased, statistically speaking, and is now slowing.

Lest we forget, the NBER committee which retroactively determines when a recession began and ended met in early April. The committee postponed an announcement regarding the end of the recession which it said began in December 2007. Such an announcement, the committee said, would be "premature."

This indicated that the economic data were so mixed that no clear recovery is evident. The Federal Reserve and other organizations have adopted spring 2009 as the end of the recession. This appears on Federal Reserve charts. But the organization that is unofficially the arbiter of such matters is not equally confident.

At this point, the conventional forecast regarding a double-dip recession is that it is unlikely to happen. In contrast, the Austrian School view is that the recovery itself may turn out to have been a statistical anomaly. We are not facing a double-dip recession, only because we have not gotten out of the 2007 recession. We are now facing a more rapid decline of an economy already in decline.

The statistics so far do not point to a full-scale recovery. This was the NBER committee's view in April. The statistics point to something unique: a supposed economic recovery in which commercial banks are reducing their lending, the overnight bank loan rate is close to zero, and long-term unemployment is at an historically high level. To produce this minimal recovery, if it really is a recovery, the Federal government is running a 2010 deficit in the $1.5 trillion range. Meanwhile, Social Security payments now exceed FICA tax revenue, so the general fund must make up the difference, thus adding to the on-budget deficit. Social Security has ceased to be an accounting cash cow for the government. It has become an accounting liability.

Rex Nutting writes for MarketWatch. He is not a famous economist. He is a columnist who spends his life summarizing economic events and data that come in over the wires. But, on August 11, when the Dow opened down by over 200 points and was not rebounding, he wrote an editorial. It reveals the despair of a Keynesian whose confidence in the restoration of economic growth has faded.

The Federal Reserve is pushing on a string, he said. It has gone about as far as it can go. It is therefore time for Congress to reassert leadership. Nutting has had great hope in the creativity of government spending. The government can borrow trillions of dollars, which can be spent by Civil Service-protected government bureaucrats who cannot be fired. His faith is fading. An overly conservative Congress is just too cautious and reluctant to spend more money, he thinks.

It doesn't take a poet to know what happens to a dream deferred. Sometimes, it explodes. If the Fed's hands are tied, are we doomed to a lost decade of deferred dreams?

Happily, no. There is one group that's still able to borrow: the federal government, which could fill the gap temporarily by directly employing idle people to fulfill some of those deferred dreams. They could teach the children, heal the sick, build the infrastructure, discover new drugs, and invent new technologies.

Unhappily, it's not going to happen.

The projected Federal deficits are in the range of a trillion dollars a year for the next decade. Not enough! Too cautious! Woe, woe, woe!

The optimists are saying that the double-dip recession will not happen, but job growth will be minimal. A jobless recovery is the new normal. This is the abandonment of Keynesianism. This is loss of faith on a paradigm-changing scope. The old Keynesian formula is no longer working. Huge deficits have not led to a V-shaped recovery, or maybe any recovery. The Keynesian multiplier is barely even adding. The Federal Reserve is pushing on a string. But so is Congress. The deficits are not working.

What's a Keynesian to do?

Call for more spending, of course. Call for even larger Federal deficits. Call for bailouts of deficit-plagued state governments, which cannot get loans from Asian central banks.

THE KEYNESIANS' FAITH

The Keynesians have only one solution: deficit spending. That is all they have had since 1936. Keynes baptized deficit-spending policies that all governments had begun several years before. He was John the Baptist for his generation. He called on old school economists to repent and be baptized in the logic of deficits. He converted most of the young economists. The old ones slowly died off, although some of them saw the error of their youth and converted.

But today the old Keynesian deficit-spending policy is no longer delivering the promised goods. The old formulas are not providing the old magic. The level of Federal debt is so great today that the percentage of each new annual deficit in relation to the total debt that has to be rolled over every five years is declining. Deficits no longer have the same "punch."

In fact, the old punch had to do with transferring resources from the private sector to the government sector. This transfer made the government sector grow and the private sector contract, compared to what would otherwise have prevailed. Government spending is counted as being the same as private spending. Government spending is considered part of the GDP. Keynesians assume that money collected by means of badges and guns is far more efficient in producing economic growth than money invested in terms of a hoped-for prospect of a positive rate of return. Keynesianism rests on faith in the following:

1. Badges and guns

2. Government IOUs

3. The wisdom of government

It is based on a lack of faith in the following:

1. Voluntary exchange

2. Private investment

3. The wisdom of entrepreneurship

We are now seeing the fruits of this view of economics. The deficits, while unprecedented, represent a declining percentage of the IOUs outstanding, both to investors and the Social Security, Medicare, and Federal pension "trust funds": accounting devices that count government IOUs as legal claims against future taxpayers. Each new deficit adds to this pile of IOUs. No one in the Establishment expects these to be paid off. Everyone expects these debts to be rolled over at low interest rates forever. There is no sense of alarm.

The Tea Party voters are beginning to sense that this is an impossible dream. Yet voters who are approaching age 65 also believe that they have a legal claim on lifetime support. They believe that these claims will be met. They believe that, since they are special, the Federal government can and will deliver on its promises to them. In short, they know they are being conned, yet they insist that the retirement Ponzi schemes will go on forever. In short, tens of millions of voters are schizophrenic.

Two groups of voters are not schizophrenic: the optimists and the pessimists. The optimists think that the promises will be kept, the Federal government can be relied on, and the system will hold. The pessimists believe that the promises will be broken, they will be stiffed in their old age, and the government is headed for a huge default.

Presumably, you are in the second group. Therefore, you are not a Keynesian. You do not believe that endless Federal deficits can continue. You do not believe that deficits will save the economy.

This raises a question: What are you doing to hedge your future against the optimists and the schizophrenics, who will resist any major spending cuts?

RUNNING OUT OF TIME

The Democrats are likely to lose control in the House next year. Their ten-vote edge in the Senate will disappear. Republicans will be able to filibuster any spending bill. This will end House Democrats' hope that voting in favor of a new spending program will get through the Senate. They will ask: "Why risk my slender base back home on a suicide vote to increase spending? If it passes, it will be killed in the Senate."

The Republicans will play the spoiler. Obama will get no new big spending programs passed by Congress. He will be able to blame Congress, just as he has blamed Bush. But if the economy does not visibly recover, and if the unemployment rate does not fall below 6%, he will take the heat. That is what the Presidency is for: taking credit or taking blame.

The government will move to gridlock next year. It will remain there for two years. The deficits will remain high. The economy will stagnate at best, or fall into a decline. There will be no major recovery that persuades voters that they are safe, that the economic future is bright.

We are seeing a loss of faith. It is all-pervasive. The voters see that Congress is impotent. The Keynesians see that the FED is impotent. The economists as a profession have rushed to the Keynesian pump to keep the ship from sinking, but the ship appears to be taking on water despite their best efforts.

Gridlock will end the prospects for a new round of spending. The Republicans will be busy campaigning for 2012. They will hold the line against major new spending projects. The deficits will continue, but the Republicans will blame Obama, the way that Obama blames Bush. "Obama saddled us with these deficits. We did not have the votes to stop him. Now we do. You can't hold us responsible for what Pelosi and Obama did." The voters, always disappointed, will respond in hope.

You can see why I have registered this domain: www.ChangeBack2012.com

CONCLUSION

"Double dips sink ships." The prospect of a double-dip recession threatens the Keynesians, just as it threatens Obama's hopes for re-election.

The Keynesians have far more at stake. Obama is limited to two terms by law. The Keynesians must keep the faith in deficits alive permanently. If their policy prescription fails, and the deficits accelerate without job growth and income growth, then they have no fall-back position. They can tell us that in the long run, the deficits will finally turn the economy back up, and things will go back to the pre-2007 normal. But if things do not return to the pre-2007 normal, then non-Keynesians will cite Keynes in their defense: "In the long run, we are all dead."

So is Federal solvency.

www.garynorth.com

Pay Rs. 312 for Email Marketing Campaign

eMarketing by Connect Marketing Services (250,635 Email Addresses - 98% All Over Pakistan)

This email is Broadcast by a marketing agency "Connect Marketing Services". If you no longer

wish to receive promotion emails, please click to unsubscribe. For customer service inquiry please email or call us.

We are not responsible for any commitment made by the advertiser. Connect Marketing Services will be fully responsible for this activity only.