"PHILANDERING PHILI" (Feb. 20, 2008)

(RE: Wall Street Journal's “Philly’s War on the Boy Scouts” by Kevin Ferris Feb. 16, 2008)

I want to join a Mosque. Preferably a local Wahhabist Mosque. Our constitution as defined by left-wing liberals guarantees me nothing less - no discrimination, no exclusion from these hallowed halls of Jihadist purity.

I am a gay female Bush-supporting Zionist Jew, and I want to join the local Mosque. I too want the ACLU, hapless Harry Reid and civil rights demon Louis Farrakhan to guarantee my rights and my safety. It's bound to be both a life-changing and educational experience. As Obama deftly says - let's all join together, in change, and conjure up a brand new America.

The Philadelphia City Council is evicting the Boy Scouts from a building the Scouts built and paid for 80 years ago and from whence tens of thousands of Boy Scouts have cleaned parks, run food drives, fed the needy and developed positive life skills. All because the Boy Scouts prefer not to enlist openly homosexual troop leaders and scouts. Why take aim at al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah or the Columbine murderers? Why focus on the international plague of female slavery and prostitution, on honor killings in our own backyard when we have the Boy Scouts?

Obviously it's impossible for gay troops and scouts to start their very own chapter. Impossible for girls to initiate their separate scout group. No reason for Boy Scout parents to be afforded any comfortability with their own private social and religious views.

Mosques are public charitable institutions supported by government tax-free status. They should welcome me, gay, female, and Jewish – especially as the Phili City Council will surely support my application for cultural diversity, for religious non-discrimination, for freedom of anyone to join any Boy Scouts, any golf club and certainly any religious institution.

I wait, with bated breath, for invitations from these brave institutions and maybe I'll also get consideration from the Black Music Awards for my latest rap song:

"I wanna bee
the first Jewessee
our first gay hippie
in our Mosque of Phili”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120312309480173061.html

http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewCulture.asp?Page=/Culture/archive/200805/CUL20080529b.html

America in Reverse (Feb. 13, 2008)

We Americans have a great passion – curative 20/20 hindsight. We too have an all consuming deficiency – that being courageous preventative vision.

We have spent hundreds of billions of dollars and allotted hundreds of thousands of security and other personnel to find a few Jihadists, unearth a few unsophisticated plots. That’s cost-ineffectiveness at its most extreme, a formula with which al-Qaeda can always out leverage us, out wait us. No matter how wealthy America is, we just cannot afford, indefinitely, to allocate such monetary treasure and such human resources to plug all the holes, secure all the borders and protect all our vulnerable facilities as long as we intend to remain an open, free and democratic society.

We have conversely, apart from our military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, spent very little on preemptive planning and implementation. Whether it be via focused taxes on gasoline (preferably with concomitant reductions in personal taxes) or Flex Fuel Vehicles (at $100 per conversion) to accommodate ethanol and methanol, we continue to blunder ahead, subsidizing terrorist regimes and Jihadist organizations by transferring hundreds of billions of oil dollars every year to the Middle East (not to ignore Chavez and Putin, et al.). We donate our gold to the Islamists and they give us petroleum. They don’t build hospitals, universities and science research institutes. Instead they build Hamas, Hezbollah, bin Laden, Ahmadinejad, intercontinental missiles, WMDs and suicide bombers.

We are clearly missing the obvious points, the elephant in our parlor.

Based on the inevitable cost-ineffectiveness of Homeland Security and on the greatest transfer of wealth the world has ever witnessed, we are engaged in a losing battle, in our demise towards insolvency and “too little too late.”

If we mandate and legislate for Flex Fuel Vehicles, if we thereby open up competition to all sources of energy, if we tax our gasoline habits and strengthen our energy alternatives, then and only then will gasoline usage reduce, then prices at the pump will drop, then the great wealth transfer will slow and the terrorists and Jihadists will finally have a deficit budget instead of Washington.

Then and only then will we be cost-effective, will we outlast and outspend our enemies and their countless madrassas. Then and only then will we be building a solid inheritance for our children.

Our current self-indulgent policies of accommodation, our fantasies of immediate gratification and our appeasement politics might very well result in the nuclear loss of some of our cities or the debasement of our wealth or both. Unless we spend more wisely, more preemptively, more courageously, we risk the future of America, the greatest experiment in freedom and democracy the world has ever known.

"The Quintessential Divide Between Democrats and Republicans" (Jan. 30, 2008)

For current Democrats, it seems, weakness comes from fearing the obligations of being strong. For true Republicans, however, strength alternatively derives from fearing the consequences of weakness far more.

OBAMA! (January 22, 2008)

Born in 1961 in Honolulu of a white American woman from very white Kansas, and a Muslim Kenyan father from that reasonably democratic and independent African country (his middle name coincidentally is Hussein). Obama also lived in Jakarta, Indonesia until age 10. Now how does that make him black? Suntanned looks but not American black. Certainly not more than myself, born in South Africa of modestly light complexion and now American; I am at least as African-American as Obama.

Some Persian or Moroccan Jews, certain Greeks or Italians, are clearly as dark as Obama if not more so – and we haven’t started down the list of Central and South American habitats. Yet to himself and his supporters he is the black candidate – even to Democratic Hillary, inexplicably.

It seems pigmentation is not really the issue – convoluted symbology is: an agenda-driven presumption of identity theft that has the same racist overtones as keeping certain groups out of the USA (think of the refugees from Nazi Germany on the S.S. St. Louis turned back from our shores, back to Europe’s efficient crematoria). It’s the same racist perversion that pretends hair character or skin tone is more important than ideas, than morality. Now that’s not very American at all.

Global Warming? (Jan. 21, 2008)

Minus 3 °F in Chicago. Where is Al Gore now that we need him? The airwaves have been unusually quiet of late.

Linkage Between Gaza & Israel "Stopping the Kassams" (Dec. 21, 2007)

In his New York Sun article, Hillel Halkin talks of five uncertain options of response to the Hamas and Islamic Jihad missile barrages against Israel. But there is a pragmatic and eminently feasible sixth option.

Option 6:

There has been and there desperately needs to be linked consequentiality - a clear response formula - this the Russians understood well and so will Hamas.

The simplest solutions are often ignored in favor of ambiguity and complexity. This need not be the case.

Israel must publish widely that every rocket sent into Israeli civilian areas will be met with an immediate and publicized return of one corresponding strike by Israel - if there are 2 or 20 Kassams in a day, Israel must drop 2 or 20 bombs, aimed at Hamas and Islamic Jihad offices, equipment or any relevant location to weaken their political and military morale, assets and ability. And if an Israeli civilian death results from a Kassam, the response must be a targeted killing meaningfully high up their chain of command.

Only then will the Palestinians and their supporters be fully educated about consequences, and the Gaza citizens and militias will necessarily and immutably grow weary of allowing or causing, with directly visible connectivity, their own demise.

Clarity not ambiguity (as was always the case) is the key. Linkage: publicized, formulaic, transparent and irrevocable is the only and the ultimate solution - the only way to drive a sizable and permanent wedge between the population held hostage (some voluntarily and some unwillingly) and the active Jihadist elements.

http://www.nysun.com/article/68266

Great (American) Expectations - Wall St. Journal Article 1/8/08

Certainly it was the best of times and the worst of times. Bret Stephens' review flawlessly covers the ongoing naïveté of an America that insists all is negotiable and that no one is irredeemably evil. It seems America is destined to decide all using emotionally naïve, black and white, media-driven inputs. Europe decides based on cynicism, cowardice and passivity. America is “change” at all costs – Europe is “no change” at all costs and the Arab world resists all change while demanding the West do all the accommodating.

Quite a triangulation that favors the extremists and sidelines the moderates, the majority. Perhaps democracy by the majority will only return after another four educative years of a Democrat Presidency, warts and all, and a resultant evolution of our naïveté into pragmatic conservatism.

WSJ.com - Commentary: Great (American) Expectations*