Diana West on tolerating the intolerant

If there's any doubt in anyone's mind about the appropriateness of the Ground Zero mosque, there should not be after reading this column by Diana West.  Once again, Diana West has spent many years in the ME and knows the Islamic faith and its practitioners like very few people do.  She reveals in this piece that Rauf, the state department's spokesperson to the Muslim countries around the world, was a signatory to the "Amman Message"(along with 500 other leading lights in the Muslim world) which says that as long as a muslim belongs to an accredited sect he could not be an apostate, denied access to Muslim salvation, etc.  Which means that Osams Bin Laden is an acceptable member of the Muslim umma.  How sweet.  This is a devastating indictment of this belief system, a totally intolerant system that extends tolerance to no one except Muslims.  Great.  And we're reaching out to these people??? Go Bloomberg.

Capitalism 101

Here is an explanation and example of how capitalism works.  This post should be required reading for all pols and for all high school and college students worldwide.  It is really quite simple.  Capitalism and the free market provides the means for progress, until the government colludes with the players to reconfigure the rues and benefit those who have already attained a measure of success.

Looming troubles in Turkey

This report from the Strafor Group, sent courtesy of a friend, reveals much of the stresses and strains going on in the politics of Turkey.  The greatest concern for the West is the possibility that the Erdogan AKP Party, which has strong ties to fundamentalist states and leaders, gains full ascendency and manages to eliminate the power and ability of the military to keep the Ataturk promise/principle of a secular state.  The Erdogan AKP is a serious threat and one that could tip the scales in the middle east should the state of Turkey turn into another Islamist Iran, a distinct possibility.


Michael Rubin is an analyst on the ME for "The Weekly Standard and the Corner.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKdN6Qgwg_k&feature=player_embedded

Freddie, Fannie and the failed policies of the dem party

Once again we see and hear what a debacle the failed social policies of the democrat party created for this nation's financial well-being.  It is criminal what they perpetrated on the American public and it was criminal that the so-called leading figures in the financial world didn't blow the whistle on them early on in this disgusting game they were all playing.  Peter Wallison rightfully points out all this here and calls for facing up to the realities of what happened in order to come up with a proper fix.  This isn't going to be easy because there is so much bad paper floating around out there as a result of the democratic party's social policies over the past three or four decades.  And make no mistake, Bill Clinton and his administration were at the heart of this problem.  It is sad to think all these foolish people are going to get away with their folly while the rest of us pay probably for a decade or more to right the system.  Andrew Cuomo should be languishing in jail along with Barney Frank, Chris Dodd and a whole host of other foolish, foolish people.  This is so disgusting it's hard to talk about.

China, Japan, and the US

As usual,  Jonah Goldberg brings clarity to the confusion sewn by left media pundits from all over.  His thoughtful  piece highlights the interdependency of the world's leading nation states and debunks the notion that competition among those states in the world economy is a zero sum game, and finally, highlights the conditions that lead to growth and maximum economic performance on the part of  an individual country's economy.  Not bad for one short article.

GM farce

The bailout of the unions and favored political allies of the Democrats by the bailout of GM has established a destructive and perhaps ruinous precedent for American business and businesses.  The way this bailout was conducted was ridiculous.  Now Obama is claiming victory as GM showed a profit and is conducting an IPO.  Good luck.
a couple of quarters of profitability does not constitute a trend.  Once the huge cash infusion (50 billion) wears off and the company has to operate on the basis of its own cash flow, we'll see, won't we now?  As this article points out, the real problem here is the precedent and the trampling on bankruptcy laws and the rights of bondholders that the administration trashed.  F****** thugs and socialists!

Hagia Sophia

Here we have the c. 600 Hagia Sophia, minus the minarets which were added by the Ottomans when they converted this remarkable and splendid ancient Christian basilica to a mosque.

This is truly one of the most stunning sites in Instanbul.  Having visited this site several times, one is always struck by the grandeur of the building and the loss of its uniqueness as a Christian Basilica once the Ottoman's exercised the typical Moslem intolerance toward non-Islamic religions.  Forcing this magnificent Christian building into something it was not intended to be resulted in the loss of priceless murals, which were plastered over in the 15th century, and the loss of several other features unique to Christendom  and the basilica building genre.