I must make a confession, here.

Most of this Internet stuff, including blogs, is pretty new to me.

Seth and Wolf were once both of the same persuation as I’ve been until recently.

Neither had any use for the Dubya Dubya Dubya, nary an email address nor a website.

Wolfie (don’t you call him that, there are only a few of us who can get away with it), however, has full grown kids who, in the course of their adolescence, needed to have a computer around the house. He ignored the damn thing as long as he could, then the young folks demanded that he use it for email purposes so they could communicate. Right, that’s what a perfectly good telephone and the U.S. Postal Service are for.

Then Seth came along, first introducing Wolf to blogs, then talking him into becoming a contributing author.

Now the Wolf spends a few hours a day on-line when he’s not otherwise occupied.

Seth says he was dragged kicking and screaming onto the Internet back in late 1981, and ended up becoming “addicted” to it.

It was he who first got me on-line not long ago, and now gotten me blogging.

The worst part of it all is that I’m enjoying the #%&*^##% out of it.

I’m not going to say much here, I’ll just let this speak for itself.

On Tuesday (Oct. 27), Iran-backed Hezbollah based in southern Lebanon fired a Katyusha rocket into Israel. Lebanese and United Nations Interim Forces in Lebanon (UNIFIL) discovered four more rockets close to the launch site, three of which were ready in launching position. The rocket launched on Oct. 27 was the ninth one launched into Israel since its defensive war again Hezbollah in 2006.[1]

Iran is Hezbollah’s primary source for arms, funding and training.[2] It procures advanced anti-tank missiles, rocket-propelled grenades, artillery rockets and other weapons on behalf of Hezbollah and provides the terrorist group with approximately $200 million annually. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard has also taken a leading role in training Hezbollah operatives and approximately 3,000 Hezbollah terrorists trained in Iranian military camps.[3]

Ambassador Gabriela Shalev, Israel’s permanent representative to the United Nations, on Oct. 14 delivered remarks to the UN Security Council underscoring the threat of Hezbollah. Her comments came two days after the explosion in Lebanon of a Hezbollah operative’s home, believed to have been serving as an arms storage facility.

“The Hizbullah terrorist organization continues to receive deadly weapons from its sponsors, members of this organization. At the same time, Hizbullah builds a military infrastructure in the midst of the civilian population south of the Litani River. Its operatives and affiliated civilians openly threaten UNIFIL, obstructing it from discharging its mandate,” Shalev said. “Hizbullah’s violations are the greatest obstacle to the implementation of resolution 1701…Southern Lebanon…is occupied by terrorism. Hizbullah terrorism.”

Hezbollah re-armed itself in southern Lebanon after the 2006 war, building bunkers, creating weapons caches and conducting paramilitary exercises south of the Litani River. The terrorist group also stockpiled more than 40,000 artillery rockets. These activities are in clear violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701, which called for Hezbollah’s disarmament.[4]

UN Security Council resolution 1701 states:[5]
• That there be no armed groups in Lebanon apart from the Lebanese army. This includes Hezbollah.

• That no arms be supplied to any Lebanese militia or armed group other than the Lebanese army. This is to be enforced by UNIFIL.

• That Hezbollah withdraw all personnel, weapons and other assets from the territory between the Israel-Lebanon border (Blue Line) up to the Litani River.

Timeline: Hezbollah’s Recent Violations of UN Security Council Resolution 1701

2009
• Oct. 27-28: A Katyusha rocket is fired from southern Lebanon and lands close to the Israeli city of Kiryat Shmona. The next day, UNIFIL and Lebanese forces go to the site from where the rocket are fired and find four more rockets, three of which were ready to be fired.[6]

• Oct. 12: An explosion occurs at the house of Hezbollah operative Sayid Issa, in the village of Tair Filsay in southern Lebanon. The house served as a weapons cache and the explosion injured several Lebanese civilians as well as the owner of the house. This arm cache was located in a civilian area south of the Litani River, a clear violation of resolution 1701.[7]

• Sept. 11: 122mm rockets are fired from near the town of Qulaylah in southern Lebanon and land in an open field in northern Israel. The organization Ziad al-Jarrah of the Abdullah Azzam Brigades claims responsibility for the attack.[8]

• July 14: An explosion occurs in an abandoned building in Khirbet Silim, a village in southern Lebanon. The size of the explosion indicates that the building was being used as an arms depot. Following the explosion, Hezbollah operatives surrounded the building and refused to let UNIFIL forces enter, while trucks cleared away the remaining weapons and debris. Only after Hezbollah cleared most of the weapons was UNIFIL allowed to enter, and was still able to discover weapons remains.[9]

• April 13: Suspects tied to a Hezbollah cell plotting attacks on Egyptian soil admitted to weapons smuggling across the border to Hamas militants. Several of the suspects smuggled weapons from Lebanese intermediaries to terrorists in the Gaza Strip.[10]

• Feb. 21: A Katyusha rocket is fired from Lebanon landed next to a house in northern Israel, injuring three civilians.[11]

• Jan. 14: Hezbollah uses proxy Palestinian militant groups to launch two Katyusha rockets from southern Lebanon into northern Israel.[12]

In view of the above, only a profound knucklehead or a liar with an anti-Israel politcal agenda could accuse the Israeli Defense Force of being “disproportionate” or using “overkill” when they respond to this type of aggression.

Nuff said.

My home is a few inches over 51′ long and a few inches short of 15′ in the beam, and while it cost more than twice, pre-owned, than your average house in the suburbs, it can move considerably faster, in the immediate neighborhood of 33 knots in calm seas (not my doing, thank a pair of Volvo Penta diesels that produce 715 MHP apiece for that).

She resides at a dock in Marina Del Rey, just down the coast from Venice, California, and is the ultimate love of my life.

Having said that, you’ll understand why, yesterday afternoon, I spent considerable time lashing her down in response to a marine forecast that called for a windy time along the California coast.

A couple of neighbors and I teamed up to secure one anothers’ boats (mine is the largest of the three by more than ten feet).

I doubled up on the fenders, then we took every ounce we could of slack out of the lines until the fenders were practically crushed against the dock.

When the wind really freshened, to the tune of something like 43 knots, I was aboard, relaxing on the overhung fantail, sipping a large Mt. Gay Eclipse Barbados dark rum, puffing on a Montecristo and enjoying the whipping wind.

It was coming from the northeast and really slamming in, palm trees being defronded and all kinds of goodies whipping through the air. The “gale” was reminiscent of the Santa Ana winds that like to pummel through from time to time, except those are generally nice and warm, whereas these originated, purportedly, in the arctic regions and things became downright cold as the hours went by. I wondered for awhile there if an Eskimo, a walrus or maybe even a polar bear might not come soaring down and land on the flying bridge.

Riding it out was great, even as tightly secured as she was, my home moved quite a bit as waves arrived beneath the hull and the winds tried their absolute best to dislodge her.

At about 2000 hours, I decided, as the wind was doing its utmost to blow me overboard, to go below and continue my rumming therein. I put on some Marshall Tucker followed by Charlie Daniels, nice and loud (no disturbing the neighbors, not with the wind rumpusing the way it was outside. It went really well, in fact, with The Devil Went Down To Georgia), and finally, somewhere around 2300, hit the rack and got a good night’s sleep despite the external hammering. Rum has a way of helping such things along.

When I awoke this morning to the percussion of pounding temples and a mouth of cotton, I started a pot of coffee and went topside to have a gander at my environs. This was at about 0715. I usually arrive home from my morning run long before that, but what the hay, sometimes it’s good to throw inconvenient habits to the winds (no pun intended) and live dangerously.

The clean-up people hadn’t yet started in, and you should’ve seen things. “Things” were strewn everywhere, a few pieces of gear adrift from other vessels at the marina (quite a few weekend sailors had neglected to thoroughly police their weather decks in advance of the coming of The Wind), large palm fronds, paper cups, various and sundry litter items, anonymous branches, even a rubber boot and what appeared to be a Nike sneaker.

Then there were legions of leaves in what looked like a miniature northeastern autumn morning. If there were any dead leaves in any trees along the southern California coast yesterday evening, they are no longer.

Anyway, just thought I’d share that.

I pretty much needed a break from politics, since watching the country I’ve spilled blood (my own and others’) for being disassembled by a corrupt left wing president and an equally anti-patriotic, anti-Constitutional, anti-America Congressional majority can be more than a little depressing and writing about it even moreso.

Now, where the hell did I leave the rum…?

Okay, well, first off, James Taranto got me started earlier while I was reading Best Of The Web Today.

Who says President Obama hasn’t accomplished anything since taking office? To his Nobel Peace Prize and two Grammys, we can add a sports record, Politico reports:

Obama has only been in office for just over nine months, but he’s already hit the links as much as President Bush did in over two years.

CBS’ Mark Knoller–an unofficial documentarian and statistician of all things White House-related–wrote on his Twitter feed [Saturday] that, “Today - Obama ties Pres. Bush in the number of rounds of golf played in office: 24. Took Bush 2 yrs & 10 months.”

Yes, we can!

Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports from Kabul that “eight American troops were killed in two separate bomb attacks Tuesday in southern Afghanistan, making October the deadliest month of the war for U.S. forces since the 2001 invasion to oust the Taliban.”

We know what you’re thinking, but this is not Obama’s fault.

Afghanistan is someone else’s mess, so why don’t you grab a mop? As White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel told CNN last week:

It’s clear that basically we had a war for eight years that was going on, that’s adrift. That we’re beginning at scratch, and just from the starting point, after eight years. . . . Before you commit troops, which is–not irreversible, but puts you down a certain path–before you make that decision, there’s a set of questions that have to have answers that have never been asked. And it’s clear after eight years of war, that’s basically starting from the beginning, and those questions never got asked. And what I find interesting and just intriguing from this debate in Washington, is that a lot of people who all of a sudden say, this is now the epicenter of the war on terror, you must do this now, immediately approve what the general said–where, before, it never even got on the radar screen for them.

Hang on a second. It has now been 51 weeks since Obama was elected president, and more than nine months since he took office, and he’s just now getting around to asking the “questions . . . that have never been asked”?

But that’s not really fair to Obama. After all, he has a busy schedule, what with golf games and pitching the International Olympic Committee and date nights and Democratic fund-raisers and health care and the U.N. Security Council and Sunday morning talk shows and saving the planet from global warming and celebrating the dog’s birthday and defending himself against Fox News and all.

Remember how the lefties used to rail at George W. Bush every time he took a break at his ranch, played a round of golf or spent a weekend at Camp David as though he were goofing off, knowing fully well that he was, like any POTUS, “on duty” 24/7?

At least Dubya addressed problems directly and did what he had to do with neither procrastination nor the blatant indecision we see festering in the Oval Office today.

Next!

Thomas Sowell talks about what amounts to the dismantling of America by the Obama Administration.

Just one year ago, would you have believed that an unelected government official — not even a Cabinet member confirmed by the Senate, but simply one of the many “czars” appointed by the President — could arbitrarily cut the pay of executives in private businesses by 50 percent or 90 percent?

Did you think that another “czar” would be talking about restricting talk radio? That there would be plans afloat to subsidize newspapers — that is, to create a situation where some newspapers’ survival would depend on the government liking what they publish?

Did you imagine that anyone would even be talking about having a panel of so-called “experts” deciding who could and could not get life-saving medical treatments?

Scary as that is from a medical standpoint, it is also chilling from the standpoint of freedom. If you have a mother who needs a heart operation or a child with some dire medical condition, how free would you feel to speak out against an administration that has the power to make life and death decisions about your loved ones?

Does any of this sound like America?

How about a federal agency giving school children material to enlist them on the side of the president? Merely being assigned to sing his praises in class is apparently not enough.

How much of America would be left if the federal government continued on this path? President Obama has already floated the idea of a national police force, something we have done without for more than two centuries.

Read the entire Thomas Sowell column here.

Yep, that’s what millions of irresponsible Americans placed at the helm of the United States last November, and may they pay twice as much for their stupidity as the rest of us.

Shame on them!

I can’t help wondering just what’s going through the Minds of the Media when they report that westerners, including Americans are going off to Islamofascist guerilla training compounds.

U.S. and European counterterrorism officials say a rising number of Western recruits — including Americans — are traveling to Afghanistan and Pakistan to attend paramilitary training camps. The flow of recruits has continued unabated, officials said, in spite of an intensified campaign over the past year by the CIA to eliminate al-Qaeda and Taliban commanders in drone missile attacks.

I’d bet cash money that 9 in 10 of these “westerners, including Americans”, are recent or offspring of recent immigrants from Muslim countries, like terorrists from the ’stans and the Mid-East are grouped by PC media as “Asians”.

Our good friends the Europeans, apparently easier to infiltrate in required numbers and afraid enough of the wrath of their own Muslim populations to give them plenty of deference laced elbow room, have been enjoying a goodly dose of Islam the last few years, the rioting in France, for example. Germany? Well…

European security officials have warned for many years of the threat posed by homegrown radicals who have gone to Afghanistan and Pakistan to wage jihad. Officials in some countries, such as Britain, said they have successfully cracked down on the number of would-be fighters going to South Asia. But others, such as Germany, are seeing a significant increase and struggling to contain it.

In the past, such volunteers were largely self-motivated and had to find their own way to South Asia. Today, however, al-Qaeda and its affiliates have developed extensive recruiting networks with agents on the ground in Europe, counterterrorism officials said. The agents provide guidance, money, travel routes and even letters of recommendation so the recruits can join up more easily.

In a recent report, the Dutch General Intelligence and Security Service said there were a “growing number of indications” that more Europeans were attending camps in the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The price, I’d say, of political correctness in the face of pure evil.

Moving right along.

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. dismissed recent attacks by predecessor Dick Cheney over President Obama’s handling of the war in Afghanistan with a “who cares,” calling Mr. Cheney “absolutely wrong” to assert that the new administration was “dithering” in setting a fresh course for the conflict.

“I think that is absolutely wrong,” the vice president said of Mr. Cheney’s criticism. “I think what the administration is doing is exactly what we said it would do, and what I think it warrants doing. And that is making an informed judgment based upon circumstances that have changed … to come up with a sustainable policy that has more than one dimension.”

I don’t know, “dithering” sounds like an applicable description to me.

The vice president offered his most extensive comments to date about the White House’s internal deliberations over the Afghan conflict, saying that “to fail to sit back and reassess where we are, I think, would be absolutely imprudent.”

Good one. Just biden your time, huh, Mr. Veep?

Do you love having a bunch of people at the helm of our country who have no gameplan, no clue, not even a guess as to what to do about anything, other than to flounder in private and then try to cover up their incompetence with a lot of baseless doubletalk?

Well, if you do, welcome to the Obama Era.

Seth is taking a necessary hiatus (agaaaiiiin!?, you ask, but this one has something to do with his getting his present and ongoing setbacks eliminated, the ones that’ve been plaguing his life for nearly a year).

To hear him tell it, for awhile he’ll be busier than a one legged man in an ass kicking contest, so I’ll try and cover up what could otherwise be a lengthy period of blog-vacuum.

Ahem, now it’s time for my opinions to be registered, the boss being gone and all.

This evening, however, I want to bring your attention to an article Seth asked me to post on, a column by Tony Blankley titled The World Won’t Wait On Washington Indecision

On three fronts — South Korean trade, Ukrainian/Russian diplomacy and Afghan war fighting — the Obama administration is being increasingly pressured by unfolding events to shed ideology and rationalizations and come quickly to a realistic analysis of world events and their consequences. In each of these cases, in the absence of very prompt United States policy decisions and actions, we shall incur long-term irreversible economic, geopolitical or national security harm. I will discuss the Afghan war decision in a future column.

That’s okay, Tony. B. Hussein’s got enough on his plate with just the other two issues, and he doesn’t seem to have the wherewithal even to give either of them the proverbial “old college try”.

In the case of South Korea, last week the European Union completed a bilateral trade deal (requiring approval by the European Parliament) with South Korea. While the 2006 U.S. deal with South Korea languishes unratified by both a Congress and White House controlled by the evidently protectionist wing of the Democratic Party, the Europeans cannot believe their luck. They basically copied our hard-negotiated tentative agreement, and if they soon ratify it, they will be able to take economic advantages over the United States.

European officials are “ecstatic” about the access they have gained. Catherine Ashton, the EU trade commissioner, told the Financial Times, “I think the package is the best we’ll ever get and I think it’s a fantastic package for Europe.” “There is no doubt the Korea-US agreement was used as a benchmark or even a model from the Korean side,” Christopher Dent, professor of East Asian political economy at the University of Leeds, told the Financial Times last week.

The pact would increase trade for South Korea-EU by about 20 percent — surging past current U.S.-South Korean trade levels if the U.S. fails to ratify our treaty first. Indecision by the U.S. government will in fact be a decision to lose up to $25 billion per annum of trade and jobs to the Europeans.

Truth to tell, I ain’t what you’d call surprised. I mean, with Cap ‘n Trade raring to go, it’s pretty obvious that keeping Americans working at all, let alone decreasing our current high unemployment numbers, is not real high on the priority list for the president and our lefty congress, nor do those liberal elitists give a flying whatchamacallit whether or not the U.S. middle class maintains a standard of living that surpasses the poor in a third world shithole.

I hate to say it, but I’m kind of wondering whether Obama and Kongress actually have an agenda, any real plans, or whether they’re just wingin’ it, fingers crossed. You know, like a “just ignore it and it will go ‘way” type attitude.

On the Ukrainian front, Russia is ratcheting up heavy pressure on the country to vote for the pro-Russia candidate in the January election, while ambiguous American policy and actions are undercutting pro-Western forces in Ukraine.

Last week, The Guardian — a prestigious leftist British newspaper — headlined an article thus: “Ukraine fears for its future as Moscow muscles in on Crimea. As Ukraine prepares for its first presidential election since the Orange Revolution, there are signs that its giant neighbour to the east will not tolerate a pro-western outcome.”

The crunch may come over Crimea, currently part of Ukraine but sought by Russia as in olden days. It was, of course, at Yalta, in Crimea, that the U.S., Britain and the Soviet Union drew spheres of influence that deeply shaped the Cold War that followed.

Today, as The Guardian ruefully notes, “almost 65 years after the ‘big three’ met in the Crimean seaside resort of Yalta — now in Ukraine — the question of zones of influence has come back to haunt Europe. Russia has made it clear that it sees Ukraine as crucial to its bold claim that it is entitled to a zone of influence in its post-Soviet backyard.”

This follows Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s August letter to Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, seen by diplomats as an “unprecedented diplomatic mugging … a seething letter,” which said not only that Yushchenko is a “nonperson” but also that Russia was reviewing Russia and Ukraine’s 1997 friendship treaty, a reference that The Guardian characterized as “a hint that Moscow may no longer respect Ukraine’s sovereign borders.”

“Diplomatic mugging.”

Where I come from, Yushchenko would’ve said “Them’s fightin’ words” and meant it, but what’s the friggin’ Ukraine gonna do against Russia? Bring a knife to a gunfight?

I mean, are we looking at the beginnings of an attempt to restore the former republics, one at a time, to the Cold War status quo, while the Obama Administration and the Kommie Kongress sit watching with a digit, the one beside the thumb or the next one over, stuck up the place in the back, there?

When The One made a liar out of himself by folding under the glare of Medvedev and his strongman mentor Vladimir Putin, reneging on the antiballistic missile system (remember that one?), he certainly showed Moscow who’s boss (hint: not Obama).

Like I said, but Tony Blankley puts so much better (but then, he’s a pro, I’m just a pajamas ‘bathing trunks and deck shoes in the saloon of my boat’ guy):

These disturbing events are being seen explicitly by Europe and Ukraine in the context of President Barack Obama’s recent decision to reverse our policy to place anti-missile defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic. Again, as even the leftist Guardian explains:

“‘A lot of people in this part of the world are seriously s——ing themselves,’ one analyst in Yalta admitted bluntly. ‘We don’t know what Obama’s deal (with Moscow) was. They think that Russia will take it as a green light,’ he added. Washington insists it dropped the shield following a new assessment of Iran’s nuclear threat. But many in Ukraine believe the White House sacrificed its commitments to eastern Europe in order to ‘reset’ relations with Moscow.”

President Obama’s refusal to meet with Yushchenko when they were both in New York for the recent United Nations conference is taken by some as further evidence that Washington is abandoning to Russian suzerainty the former Soviet-controlled states of eastern Europe.

Well, I’ve thought, at least since Obama started his campaign for his current job (yeah, he’s doing a job on us, alright) and since Pelosi and the rest of the lefty crowd took over and transformed Congress into Kongress, that the helm of government was going to hard left rudder.

The Europeans strongly oppose Moscow’s imperial assertions but seem unable to speak out, let alone act, without American leadership. In fact, Brussels has indicated that Ukraine has no hope of joining the EU in the foreseeable future.

Hah! I seem to recall that during the bulk of the Bush 2 Administration, all we heard was criticism from the rest of the world. According to the leftist mainstream media, we were hated because of Dubya, you know, one of those POTUSes who was more concerned with what he perceived as America’s interests than what other countries perceived as the way he should do his job. That’s called leadership.

This European passivity comes in the face of President Obama’s idealistic call at the U.N. last month that “those who used to chastise America for acting alone in the world cannot now stand by and wait for America to solve the world’s problems alone.”

It seems that Europe, in fact, will stand by. The world may say it disapproves of bold American leadership, but it fears — and is powerless in — its absence. Except, of course, to nibble at our economic ankles while we are inattentive.

What’s this? Now that we have a leader who can’t lead, all those other countries are sort of quiet in their criticism, at least the kind that they once used to blast Bush for taking a leadership role in global affairs. Now they’re in a quandary! Where’s America’s leadership!? We need it!

Well, Europe, your politically motivated lefty asswipes of the Nobel Kommittee spoke your piece for you when they issued B. Hussein the prize they’ve relegated, in their choices of recipients over the last couple of decades, to the value of something out of a Cracker Jack box.

The big problem with The One’s antics, or, more to the point, lack thereof, is that his inaction/indecision of today will leave future Presidents with crises that will make anything happening now look pretty pedestrian.

…or at least that’s the impression I get.

Government regulators threatened to remove top Bank of America executives if they backed out of a buyout of failing brokerage giant Merrill Lynch, and offered to provide taxpayer funds to compensate for Merrill’s poor performance, according to company records obtained by The Washington Times.

Well!

“It’s highly unusual for a government agency - let alone a Treasury secretary and a Fed official - to virtually order a company to do something like this under threat of removal,”said Cornelius Hurley, director of the Morin Center for Banking and Financial Law at the Boston University School of Law. “It raises a fascinating question which is, if you’re Bank of America and you have a shareholder’s interests paramount in your mind, what is your liability if you go against those interests in the interests of the country?”

I don’t really see this as being in the interests of the country, more in the interests of the Obama Administration which, much as I hate to say it as I’ve always believed in supporting the President, whoever he might be, but I draw the line at Obama. I believe that electing him was a mistake of the highest order, one I think will even be acknowledged as such, eventually, by the majority of the voters responsible.

Bank of America’s acquisition of Merrill Lynch - and the government’s role in the deal - are the subject of a hearing Thursday before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Bank of America executives said they were told their top brass would be fired if they attempted to renegotiate their bid for Merrill by declaring what’s known as a “material adverse change” (MAC) - a clause in their acquisition agreement that would allow them to walk away or renegotiate the price in light of Merrill’s mounting losses.

“The Treasury and the Fed strongly stated that if we were to invoke the MAC clause and fail to close this transaction, they would remove the board and management due to the risk we would create in the system,” according to draft talking points prepared by company attorneys for Mr. Lewis ahead of a Dec. 22, 2008, board meeting.

Bank executives say financial regulators assured them that taxpayer money from the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) bailout fund was available to compensate them for Merrill’s disappointing fourth-quarter financial results if they followed through on the deal.

Hmmmm, TARP… wonder where they get the money for that?

If I’m not mistaken, I think some well heeled guy who never runs out of money is treating the government to that one, um, a dude by the name of Joe Taxpayer.

Anyway, Tarp’s available to compensate them for Merrill’s disappointing failure to perform for their clients and shareholders fourth-quarter financial results.

Der Kommissars have spoken.

Step right up! We got Obama, we got czars, we got kommissars…!

UPDATE

Speaking of TARP…

Wolf here.

We haven’t really had a post here at Hard Astarboard on Islamofascism for quite awhile. It’s not that there has been any “easing up” of the threat the evil 7th Century cult of Islam poses to free thinking, free worshipping and free living societies everywhere on the planet, because believe me, there has been no such thing. The fundamentalist Muslim enemy is working just as hard as ever, to each region of the world its own strategy, to press on toward their goal of a global caliphate.

Nah, it’s just that Seth decided, since most of my career was rather directly involved in confronting and combating the reemergence of that dark force in modern times, I should take on the role of Islamic Affairs (read that as terrorism) author.

I must admit that I haven’t had much to say on the subject, mainly because I’ve had a lot of other things on my plate the last year or so, but at the same time haven’t felt entirely remiss, since there have been others carrying that guide-on with profound eloquence, others such as W.C. and Always On Watch at The Gathering Storm.

Okay, now that we’ve got all that out of the way, I have here some linkage that came from a comment left in one of Seth’s previous posts by Jake Neuman, author of Islam: Evil in the Name of God, which, in the linked summary, says,

This is an historical book totally devoid of any political

correctness. The Western World is engaged in a life and

death struggle with Islam.

Following the above link, you can read the synapsis and judge for yourself — I have not yet read the book, but I plan to order it as from what I can see, the author has pretty well nailed the beast called Islam.

He seems to cover their stealth agenda, the political cover they are enjoying from governments such ours in the name of political correctness and the price we’ll pay if we don’t start addressing this threat soon.

To order Islam: Evil In The Name Of God from Felibri Publishing, you can go to this link.

This one’s for the paperback copy.

In a reply to an email from me, the author sent the content of an article he wrote for an Israeli website, but according to Seth(he be da boss)’s policy, before I publish content from another site, I have to have a link to it. Hopefully, the author will link to it in a comment on the thread from this post.

This looks like a good read for anyone who either isn’t yet convinced that we face a dire threat by the continued existence of Islam, or anyone who wants more information about the danger it poses for our future.

Wolf out.

Wesley Pruden also comments on Obama’s Nobel — or in his terms, “Ignoble” — Prize.

Pity Barack Obama. The last thing he needs is another comparison to Jimmy Carter. He could survive the endorsements of his Nobel Prize by Fidel Castro (”a positive measure”), from Dmitry Medvedev, the president of Russia (”evidence of a realistic vision”), or even from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, aspiring Jew-killer and president of Iran (”bringing justice to the world order”).

He’s got enough with Jimmy Carter already. Mr. Jimmy called the president’s prize “a positive development.” But celebrating weakness in the face of a challenge and bowing to bullies in an abject hope that the bully will go easy will always turn a real man’s stomach. It’s the celebration of weakness that’s so infuriating. The anger is not about Mr. Obama. Not yet. He hasn’t done anything.

Yes, but the liberals on the Nobel Committee are more concerned with rewarding people for pursuing their political agendas than for doing anything of true value to mankind.

The Alfred E. Neuman (”What? Me Worry?”) strategy for dealing with despots, which is always the default strategy of the Europeans, inevitably leads to rape, regrets and ruin. The Nobel jury wouldn’t have to look far for a caution. Norway tried to appease the Nazis, twice declaring itself neutral shortly before the outbreak of World War II. The Nazis invaded anyway, sending the royal family fleeing to London. Many Norwegians fought bravely in the resistance, but the most memorable Norwegian figure of the war was the infamous Vidkun Quisling, the head of a puppet government whose name became a synonym for traitor.

Nevertheless, appeasement is admired by the Nobel juries. FDR never got a Nobel Peace Prize. Neither did Harry Truman or Winston Churchill. Ditto Ronald Reagan. But Yasser Arafat won in 1994. And of course Mr. Jimmy in 2002. Few Americans, beyond those hopelessly in thrall of the politically correct, are any longer surprised by the silliness of the Nobel Peace Prize juries.

A terrorist and a President who had absolutely nothing positive to show for his four year term. What a pair!

The Nobel Peace Prize was once thought to be the ultimate reward for selfless idealism, and if you’re still in high school, maybe it is today. A decade ago four high-school girls in Kansas heard the story of Irena Sendler, a Polish social worker who saved 2,500 Jewish babies from the Nazis. They wrote a play about her and sent letters to world figures, and this led to her nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Miss Sendler, who died last year at age 98, smuggled the babies out of the Warsaw Ghetto in an ambulance over several months early in the war, hiding them in crates, burlap sacks and several times in coffins. She kept a barking dog to drown the cries of the frightened babies. The Nazis arrested her and tortured her severely, breaking her legs in a vise. She bribed a guard to escape a firing squad, and after the war retrieved the names of the babies from jars she buried in her garden, and reunited hundreds of them with relatives.

So what happened?

The Nobel jury was not impressed. They gave the prize that year to Al Gore for his slide show about global warming.

Unbelievable! Except, of course, if one looks at the Nobel Committee’s track record for awards.

The entire Wesley Pruden column is here.

…from Mark Steyn.

Was it only April? There was President Barack Obama, speaking (as is his wont) in Prague, about the Iranian nuclear program and ballistic missile capability, and saluting America’s plucky allies: “The Czech Republic and Poland have been courageous in agreeing to host a defense against these missiles,” he declared. “As long as the threat from Iran persists, we will go forward with a missile defense system that is cost-effective and proven.”

On Thursday, the administration scrapped its missile defense plans for Eastern Europe. The “courageous” Czechs and Poles will have to take their chances. Did the “threat from Iran” go away? Not so’s you’d notice. The dawn of the nuclear Ayatollahs is perhaps only months away, and, just in case the Zionists or (please, no tittering) the formerly Great Satan is minded to take ‘em out, Tehran will shortly be taking delivery of a bunch of S-300 anti-aircraft batteries from (ta-da!) Russia. Fancy that.

Fancy that, LOL.

Joe Klein, the geostrategic thinker of Time magazine, concluded his analysis thus:

“This is just speculation on my part. But I do hope that this anti-missile move has a Russian concession attached to it, perhaps not publicly (just as the U.S. agreement to remove its nuclear missiles from Turkey was not make public during the Cuban Missile Crisis). The Obama administration’s diplomatic strategy is, I believe, wise and comprehensive — but it needs to show more than public concessions over time. A few diplomatic victories wouldn’t hurt.”

Golly. We know, thanks to Jimmy Carter, Joe Klein and many others, that we critics of President Obama’s health care policy are, by definition, racist. Has criticism of Obama’s foreign policy also been deemed racist? Because one can certainly detect the first faint seeds of doubt germinating in dear old Joe’s soon-to-be-racist breast: The Obama administration “needs to show more than public concessions over time” — because otherwise the entire planet may get the vague impression that that’s all there is.

Especially if your pre-emptive capitulations are as felicitously timed as the missile-defense announcement, stiffing the Poles on the 70th anniversary of their invasion by the Red Army. As for the Czechs, well, dust off your Neville Chamberlain’s Greatest Hits LP: Like he said, they’re a faraway country of which we know little. So who cares? Everything old is new again.

Amazing, isn’t it? I wouldn’t be surprised if the left and the Obamas had characters like the Cheshire Cat and the Mad Hatter lurking around in the White House and the halls of Congress, given the logic, or whatever you call it, that seems to provide a basis for American policy of late.

It is interesting to contrast the administration’s “wise” diplomacy abroad with its willingness to go nuclear at home. If you go to a “town hall” meeting and express misgivings about the effectiveness of the stimulus, you’re a “racist” “angry” “Nazi” “evilmonger” “right-wing domestic terrorist.” It’s perhaps no surprise that that doesn’t leave a lot left over in the rhetorical arsenal for Putin, Chavez and Ahmadinejad. But you’ve got to figure that by now the world’s strongmen are getting the measure of the new Washington….

Steyn is so very right (no pun intended) here, the entire column is a must read.