FMJRA 2.0: Hey Porter

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery! Please submit your links for next week’s FMJRA to me no later than Friday (and in no more than two e-mails, please, for I am easily confused) August 10.

Category: FMJRA Award

Why ‘Moderate Islam’ Is Doomed

Posted on | August 5, 2012 | 19 Comments

Moderation is not a fighting creed. Voices of compromise and tolerance can never prevail in a culture that permits militant radicals to resort to intimidation and violence to achieve their ends. David Herzenhorn of the New York Times reports a brutal lesson from Russia:

MOSCOW — A self-described guerrilla fighter urging strict adherence to Islamic law has claimed responsibility for the killing last month of one Muslim leader and the attempted murder of another, in Tatarstan, a region in central Russia that prides itself on a tradition of religious tolerance.
“On July 19, 2012, on my orders an operation was conducted against the enemies of Allah,” the guerrilla fighter, who identified himself as Muhammad, emir of the mujahedeen of Tatarstan, said in a video posted on an Islamist Internet site that focuses on the predominantly Muslim Caucasus region, including Chechnya.
In the video, he is shown sitting in the woods, with an automatic rifle propped against one knee. He specifically named the victims of the attack last month: Valiulla Yakupov, the cleric in charge of Islamic education in Tatarstan, who was shot and killed outside his home in Kazan, the regional capital; and Ildus Faizov, the chief mufti in the region, who survived a car-bomb attack less than an hour later.
“All praise Allah,” the jihadist, Muhammad, said in the video. “We believe the operation was a success.” He also warned of further violence against Muslim leaders who do not adhere to Shariah, the strict legal code of Islam based on the Koran.
“If any of the imams do not want or cannot carry out the points established by Shariah, they should leave their posts,” he said. “That way, you will be protected from the mujahedeen.”

(Via Memeorandum.) It is useless, as a counter-argument, to point out that the vast majority of Muslims are not violent terrorists, when any who do not share the ideology of the radicals are denounced as “the enemies of Allah” and regarded as acceptable targets for assassination.

In all likelihood, the clerics targeted by “the emir of the mujahedeen” shared their killer’s ultimate goal — the Islamicization of Russia — but were killed because they did not endorse his proposed means of achieving that goal, i.e., an immediate violent uprising. And the profoundly troubling aspect of this, as any objective student of Islamic history must agree, is that the assassin’s co-religionists can scarcely claim that his acts are incompatible with their faith. Islam’s founder was a warrior, who spread his beliefs by the sword, and the Prophet’s successors took up that sword to expand their religious dominion by violent conquest. No matter how sincerely “fundamentalist” a Muslim leader may be, he is vulnerable to the accusation of apostasy if he rejects violent jihad as a means of achieving worldwide Islamic supremacy.

It has become unfortunately fashionable in the West, even among some soi-dissant conservatives, to ignore this unfortunate reality and to denounce as advocates of “Islamophobia” anyone who dares call attention to the dangerous truth about radical Islam.

Witness how the Left greeted Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer in Stockholm and witness, alas, how little notice conservatives give to the battle that Geller and Spencer have so courageously fought.

Hundreds turn out to hear American conservatives speak in Sweden, they are greeted with vitriolic hate by Swedish leftists and — despite the genuinely newsworthy nature of this occasion — where is the Army of Breitbarts to cheer on the conservative heroes?

Robert Spencer mocks the idea that violent Islamic jihadists misunderstand their own religion. His good humor disproves the assertions of his critics that Spencer is a grim hateful fanatic, although Spencer is nevertheless serious about the grim hateful fanaticism of his antagonists, both among the radical jihadists and the radical leftists who side with “the emir of the mujahedeen” against the West.

The Left would have you believe that the danger free people face is not from radical Islam, but from “extremists” like Geller and Spencer. In fact, the danger is from those foolish enough to think that the war against “the enemies of Allah,” which brings death to Muslims in faraway Tatarstan, has ceased to be a danger to America, merely because the jihadis have not recently committed any headline-grabbing terrorist atrocities here. Leftists dishonestly inflame suspicion of the Tea Party, attempting to blame them for the Aurora massacre. (Tucson killer Jared Loughner will plead guilty for his crimes, although the liberal media already convicted Sarah Palin.) Meanwhile, the menace of Islamic extremism remains, waging a worldwide war that we seldom seem to notice anymore.

We are seeing a re-enactment of a familiar theme: The confusion caused by those who insist that we should not fear our enemy, but rather fear those who warn against the enemy. In England during the ’30s, the advocates of appeasement insisted that Churchill was a greater danger than Hitler. More recently, during the Cold War, there were those who claimed that anti-Communist “extremists” like Ronald Reagan were a greater danger than the Communists themselves. And now we find that many fools have been persuaded by those who say that “Islamophobia” is a greater danger than Islam.

Will we be deceived? I am not, although I seldom write on this topic, on which others have far more expertise. My accustomed silence, however, should not be confused with neutrality or indifference. In the aftermath of 9/11, many Americans wrung their hands in perplexity, thinking that somehow our nation had brought this evil upon ourselves.

The liberals asked, “Why do they hate us?” And the eloquent answer came from a Lebanese woman, Brigitte Gabriel: Because They Hate.

There is no safety in cowardly silence. No one deserves to be the victim of terrorism, and the killers alone are responsible for their crimes. Yet we have a duty to defend the innocent against evil and, if we fail in that duty, our failure carried its own burden of guilt.

Those who have the courage to speak out against the danger — including not only Geller and Spencer, but also such witnesses as Nonie Darwish, Wafa Sultan and Ayaan Hirsi Ali — deserve our support. We cannot rely on “moderate Muslims” to restrain the danger, because if proponents of radical Islam cannot terrorize the moderate “enemies of Allah” into silence, they will kill them. How many more “moderates” will have to die before we admit the radical truth?

Category: Atlas Shrugs, Culture, Islam, Russia, Sweden, Terrorism

Caroline Glick Offers A Sane View Of The Middle East

Posted on | August 5, 2012 | 2 Comments

by Smitty

Glick just rips this administration’s preference for posture over policy.

Here and you thought Caroline was just about laughs.

via American Power

Category: Egypt, Israel

Harry Reid … Boxer?

Posted on | August 5, 2012 | 20 Comments

by Smitty

I saw this on Hot Air

According to a source familiar with Reid’s thinking, the majority leader, a former boxer, considers himself a political street fighter now

A bit of Wikipedia takes you to LVRJ:

Reid was not born into a Mormon family and did not join the church until he was a student at Utah State University in Logan. After a rough and tumble upbringing in the mining town of Searchlight, Reid became an amateur boxer and has acknowledged getting “called out” from bars in his youth.
“I am, by nature, somebody that … I was raised where you settled your differences physically, and I still have a little of that in me and I’m fighting that all the time. I don’t want to be mean to people,” he said.

Excuse me, but:

Ha ha ha ha!

Dingius Maximus, suited for action

We need far more evidence than a story by Tony Batt in a friendly fish wrapper to put some viagra in Harry’s limp tale. If that story sucked any more, it would be. . .a literary biography, wherein Harry Reid was born behind the Iron Curtain, the son of a freedom fighter, whose father died protecting him and his laboring mother from Commies. Mom snuffs it, too, leaving Harry to be raised by wolves. Then he wanders southeast, in the ruins of the WWII Balkans, barely missing a chance to wax a Nazi sympathizer whose name sounds like ‘morose’.

Hopping on a merchant vessel in his late teens, Reid comes to America, learning English from Isaac Asimov novels. The Foundation Trilogy, of course fires his imagination, as a Progressively perfected humanity seems a swell idea. He drifts west, finagles his way through school, launches a political career, and the rest is indistinguishable from an unflushed toilet.

Oh, no, wait: boxer. I get it. Not the pugilist kind, but:

English could be the language of ambiguity, but maybe not.

This post is not intentionally an insult to the Silver State. It’s just that when I think of amateur Congressional boxers, I think of my bottle-hitting Congress-tool, ‘Gentleman’ Jim Moran.

More at The Lonely Conservative, where we find out how the Dingy One takes care of ‘the family’. I wonder how much honest, simple investigative journalism it will take to uncover enough ethically dodgy crap in Reid’s past to make resignation seem attractive to the fellow.

I disagree with Bill Quick here. Not to be a Harry Reid apologist even slightly, Ethics Alarms has the right of it. What Jerry Sandusky did was unspeakable; let it therefore remain unspoken, unless delivering a subpoena for similar offenses. The Left denies Truth and opts for nihilism. Let the Lefties destroy their souls without choosing to follow, say I.

While not offering a full theory of “Good Clean Mockery” or claiming any authority over the idea, some of my internal editorial principles are:

Leave peoples’ names alone. By drawing a line there, I help myself to remember that even Harry Reid has a heart, albeit stone.
No potty mouth. The internet is full of little Quentin Tarantinos without me adding to that. The Lord sees all, as might someone from church.
Let the unspeakable remain unspoken. Sexuality is a private matter. If you’re going to make these kinds of accusations against Harry Reid, why not let it all hang out at the Chick-Fil-A with someone of the same gender? Pecca fortiter! No? Me neither.
Opt for a laugh. As I’ve tried to do in this post.

Update: linked by Hogewash

Category: Democrats, Nevada

GIVE US RYAN!

Posted on | August 4, 2012 | 119 Comments

This is an emergency post. Driving back from the AFP Defending the Dream Summit in D.C., I pulled off the freeway and logged on at a Burger King to get this online as quickly as possible: Mitt Romney must choose Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan as his vice-presidential nominee, period.

There is no time now to fully explain the emergency nature of this post, but let me quickly make three points:

My hatred of media “veepstakes” speculation is well-known. When I turn on the TV and see a bunch of pundits talking about who might get the vice-presidential nomination, I turn the channel. It’s a bunch of useless noise, and I can’t stand to watch it. Nevertheless, a sudden crisis makes it imperative that I speak out.
My first choice — and what I think was the most obvious choice — was Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. However, the word among Republican sources is that there were problems with Rubio in terms of vetting. Loath as I am to repeat this, I’ve heard talk that because Rubio is the son of immigrants, there is concern that this might cost Republicans the “Birther” vote. Crazy? Yeah. But whatever the basis for the objections, the general belief is that there is indeed some sort of vetting issue. And so the smart money says that, although Rubio is still officially on the “short list,” he’s unlikely to be the final choice.
The emergency? Two words: Tim Pawlenty.

Friday night, I was talking to some top activists at the AFP summit and one of them assured me that the word among Minnesota Republicans is that T-Paw is at the top of Romney’s VP list, all but guaranteed to be the running mate. Do I have to explain why this shocked me?

So shocked was I, in fact, that I refused to believe it. Certainly, the smart guys at Team Mitt could see the obvious arguments against T-Paw. But then Saturday, I talked to some well-informed D.C.-based operatives and they, too, said they’d heard that Pawlenty was top of the list.

Now I was truly concerned. Dear God, not T-Paw!

Driving home, this worry weighed heavily on my thoughts, and so I called a well-connected and experienced conservative journalist to talk about it — and he’d heard the same basic thing: Pawlenty might already have the VP spot locked up, said my friend, who happens to be a supporter of Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal. According to my friend, the word is that T-Paw is at the top of the list, with Ohio Sen. Rob Portman the nearest rival. And this is even worse news. While I like Portman OK, he’s a Bush guy, and we don’t need any ghosts of the Bush administration haunting the GOP in 2012.

So if Rubio has been more or less eliminated from consideration, as my sources suggest, we’ve got to do something to stop this crazy talk about a Romney-Pawlenty ticket. You can’t beat somebody with nobody, and of the remaining guys on the short list, Paul Ryan is the obvious pick.

He’s an Irish Catholic from the Midwest, a hero of deficit hawks, young and handsome, and pre-approved by Bill Kristol, who deems Ryan “the Republican party’s intellectual leader.”

This is, I repeat, an emergency, because Kristol says Mitt’s VP pick could be announced as early as Wednesday, or more likely Aug. 13-15. So if conservatives are going to push back against an ill-advised choice of Pawlenty, we’ve got to start pushing now, and pushing hard as hell.

Ali Akbar started a hashtag, #GiveUsRyan, so you can tell @MittRomney you want @RepPaulRyan as VP. Make it happen!

UPDATE: Wow! Bobby Jindal, himself a short-list candidate for VP, praises Paul Ryan at the Red State Gathering. Momentum!

UPDATE II: Twitchy has more from the Red State Gathering:

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, himself often mentioned as a top-tier candidate for vice president, today recommended Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan for the job.
Speaking this afternoon at RedState Gathering 2012 in Jacksonville, Fla., Jindal’s message of responsible spending and education reform had plenty of attendees sold on him as the vice presidential candidate. . . .
Asked by Breitbart’s Larry O’Connor his pick for vice president, though, Jindal named Ryan as his favorite of “a lot of great choices.” “Paul Ryan has been specific, bold and courageous in his budget plans,” said Jindal.

Linked by Jackie Wellfonder and the Daley Gator — thanks!

Category: Election 2012, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, Wisconsin

A Root Canal, Or A Post On Taxation. You’re Opting For The Dentist?

Posted on | August 4, 2012 | Comments Off on A Root Canal, Or A Post On Taxation. You’re Opting For The Dentist?

by Smitty

There was an excellent panel yesterday on a topic that is so important, it isn’t addressed with any seriousness: taxation. Sure, candidates and parties natter on about it in a purely class-warfare sort of way. But that’s all hormonal whinging, turning emotion into power. Quite successfully, too. Which is why all that ‘fair share’ and ‘1%’ talk is as inevitable as death.

Yesterday saw Douglas Holtz-Eakin and Stephen J. Entin offered some remarks with humor that easily achieved British levels of dryness. Shorter wonks: a non-suck tax code is achievable, but requires a determined, engaged electorate. I emailed Entin about online availability of his slides. Afterward, I asked DHE if the lack of a budget for 3+ years meant all talk of tax reform was moot “on our current course”, and he seemed affirmative on the point. AFP events are non-partisan, and the problem of our mad, mad tax code is certainly bipartisan. But if we’re to have a snowball’s chance, we have to have other than a tin-pot dictator at the helm.

DHE:

SJE:

Category: Taxes

‘Real’ Conservatives Of The Sunshine State, Crist Edition

Posted on | August 4, 2012 | 3 Comments

by Smitty

Former Florida Governor and Anderson Cooper wannabee Charlie Crist was on The Shark Tank’s radar:

Crist recently gave a ‘full-throated’ endorsement of Senator Bill Nelson over Connie Mack, and Speaker Weatherford offered his take on Crist’s “evolution”-

I guess it’s his coming out party, so to speak, so he is coming out and letting people know where he really stands philosophically-I don’t think it surprised a lot of us- he governed as a Democrat.

Seeing Crist gaily tread the Arlen Specter Trail just goes to show: you can lead a man to Chick-Fil-A, but you can’t do much about his Dairy Queen cravings.

Category: Florida

WHO IS ‘MONTANA COWGIRL’?

Posted on | August 4, 2012 | 17 Comments

WASHINGTON, D.C.
During the question-and-answer session following a panel discussion at the Americans for Prosperity Summit at the Washington Hilton, a Montana activist stood up and began to explain a scandal involving a liberal blogger in his home state.

The anonymous “Montana Cowgirl” blog has been doing professional-style “oppo” research work against conservative activists in the state. Two years ago, the Associated Press reported that “Montana Cowgirl” was working from a state government IP address:

The Department of Administration, provided with detail on the IP address of some posts, was able to identify that the blogger had been accessing — all day long at times — the state wireless guest system through a hookup in the Office of Public Instruction using an Apple Macintosh laptop.
The agency spokeswoman at the time, Jessica Rhoades, said neither she nor anyone else at the agency was doing it. Rhoades, who recently went to work for the governor’s office, said the agency’s information technology found at that time the wireless system could theoretically be accessed by someone sitting in the parking lot.

John Adams of the Great Falls Tribune observed at the time:

[W]hoever MT Cowgirl is, that particular blogger has shown an “uncanny knack” of tracking down insider information before anyone else, including most journalists, and has been a major cheerleader of [Democrat] Gov. Brian Schweitzer.
Speculation about her/his identity has been a hot topic for many months within Montana’s political circles. MT Cowgirl blogs with a ferocity and frequency that’s dazzling, but she does so anonymously and without any accountability. She doesn’t hesitate to post a “rumor,” and she has at times angered fellow progressives.

It is believed by some Montana activists that “Montana Cowgirl” is actually an attorney employed in the governor’s office. Paying a political opposition researcher from taxpayer funds would almost certainly be illegal and yet, as the activist who raised the issue at today’s AFP panel pointed out, there has been no investigative follow-up on this potential scandal, and the media have mostly ignored it.

So the question remains: WHO IS ‘MONTANA COWGIRL’?

Category: Montana

« go back — keep looking »

About

This is an area on your website where you can add text. This will serve as an informative location on your website, where you can talk about your site.

The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

FMJRA 2.0: Hey Porter

Why ‘Moderate Islam’ Is Doomed

Caroline Glick Offers A Sane View Of The Middle East

Harry Reid … Boxer?

Ha ha ha ha!

GIVE US RYAN!

A Root Canal, Or A Post On Taxation. You’re Opting For The Dentist?

‘Real’ Conservatives Of The Sunshine State, Crist Edition

WHO IS ‘MONTANA COWGIRL’?

THE FULL METAL JACKET REACH-AROUND AWARD

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

Search

Recent Posts

RSS reader subscription

MEMEORANDUM

Recent Comments

THE AMAZING GONZO FEED

Major Leagues

Archives

Free Agents

SHAMELESS CAPITALISM

Triple-A Franchises

Blogroll

About

Subscribe to our feed

Search

Admin