As Netanyahu is sworn in as Prime Minister for the second time, he takes power in a year that is as crucial to the survival of Israel, as 1947 was. And he has to do it all while performing in a political circus the likes of which anyone has hardly ever seen.

The closest American analogy to Netanyahu's challenges would be if George W. Bush was called back to run the country for a third term with a cabinet composed of Hillary Clinton, Jesse Ventura, Pat Robertson, Joe Biden and Al Sharpton... any of whom could topple his government at any time just by walking out. During an economic crisis and facing a nuclear threat from a revived Soviet Union run by a madman, which had just created and armed a separatist 100 million man state in Aztlan comprising most of Texas, Arizona, Nevada and California. All the while the rest of the world was doing its best to brand the United States, a terrorist regime and calling for its dismantlement and destruction.

The problems and threats that Netanyahu has to deal with are numerous and great. Beginning with...

1. Internal War

The Oslo process begun by the Rabin government has steadily created a terrorist army within Israel's own borders. Over the next decade and a half, that army has steadily advanced from a guerrilla force to a quasi state. The regular rocket attacks on Israel, from within Israel, demonstrate that we are approaching the Third Stage of Mao's 3 stages of Guerrilla Warfare.

While Fatah\Hamas are in no shape to fight a conventional war with Israeli troops singlehanded, they have they shown that they don't need to. Instead a generation of territorial concessions by Israeli politicians has wrecked the morale of the Israeli public and locked the country into a one way course of more appeasement and concessions, interrupted by occasional bombing raids that fail to change the situation on the ground.

Israel's capital is now on the chopping block Israeli Arabs are becoming radicalized and terrorist cells are now active in Jerusalem itself. Should any part of the city be sacrificed, the conflict will quickly move into Stage Three, with a divided city at war. New demands will be placed on the table, involving territorial concessions across the Galilee and the Return of the Refugees, essentially the dismantlement of Israel.

Israel's left has firmly wedded itself to more concessions, regardless of the consequences. Israel's right has tried to hold out for more moderate concessions, in exchange for an end to the terror. Naturally the concessions themselves are the cause of much of the terrorism, and as a result each phase of concessions, only boosts the terrorism index higher.

In his first term Netanyahu failed to hold out, and wound up both making concessions and being blamed for causing terrorism by taking "provocative steps". The Clinton Administration managed to topple his government, resulting in Barak's hasty withdrawal from Lebanon, turning the border over to Hizbullah, with the resulting disastrous effect we saw during the Second Lebanon War.

This time out Netanyahu will have to resist pressure from an administration so nakedly hostile to Israel, that the Clinton Administration looks almost friendly by comparison. His government has been saddled with Barak on Defense, despite his legacy of failure. And he will have to overcome both those problems to take a hard stand against Arab terrorism and international interference in Israel's domestic affairs.

Time is short and there is no more room for Do Overs. Once Israel hits Stage Three warfare, the way will be open for international peacekeepers to intervene, naturally on the enemy side. Israel will have a choice between being Yugoslavia or being carved up at gunpoint. Neither option is particularly appealing.

2. Foreign Affairs

Israel has grown much too dependent on its relationship with America. The friendship however began to sour as the US pushed harder for Israel to make a deal with Arafat. Bush Sr and Clinton finally succeeded, and the result has brought Israel to brink of disaster.

This time out however the situation is far worse, with an open terrorist sympathizer in the White House, and the State Department's toadies running around the world to cut deals with Iran, Syria, Hamas, the Taliban and any terrorist or Islamofascist who will talk to them. Israeli diplomats and military aides however have been ignored, frozen out or threatened.

As Netanyahu takes office, he will find the looming eye of Obama looking over his shoulder, and demanding that Israel conduct talks with Hamas, cut open its own capital and begin making territorial concessions on a whole new scale. with Iran's puppets in Syria, Lebanon and Gaza.

With US backing for Hamas, the Fatah\Hamas unity government will quickly become the Hamas government, turning the PA into a Hamas run organization. That means that Iran will have tens of thousands of armed military personnel inside Israel. And that the US will pressure Israel into turning over more territory, cash, weapons and power to Mini-Iran.

Paradoxically parts of Europe may prove friendlier by comparison, but not by much. And any diplomatic relations reached with the Muslim world will continue falling apart.

Breaking the Diplomatic Cycle of Terrorism will require thinking outside the box. Whether Israel continues making concessions, makes fewer concessions or make no concessions will not change the diplomatic assault being applied against Israel. Sooner or later, an Israeli soldier will shoot a terrorist-- and once again there will be UN resolutions about genocide, Olyphant cartoons regurgitated from Der Sturmer, and condemnations of Israel violence. The entire circus has been running for far too long, for anyone to pack up the tents.

Israel can get off the train and go on the offensive for a change, or keep getting torn to pieces, even as it's busy trying to surrender. The latter is the "safe option" that Prime Minister after Prime Minister has done, including Netanyahu himself. The former is the only hope for Israel's survival.

For a decade and a half, Israel has been playing the game by UN rules, by Moscow rules, by Washington D.C. rules and Riyadh rules. By accepting those terms of engagement, Israel has accepted their desired final outcome of the war. Its own defeat and destruction. To survive, Israel must choose its own rules, end its defensive wars and defensive diplomacy. To survive, Israel must fight back. Not in limited operations, but in a decisive campaign with a decisive outcome.

Obama's victory is both a final threat and a final opportunity for Israel to end its psychological dependency on the US, to break with the disastrous politics of a decade and a half, and decide its own destiny. If Israel fails to do so, it will go over the cliff still clinging to the White House.

3. External War

While Iran has kept busy feeding proxy wars against Israel, in Lebanon and Gaza... Iran is moving toward achieving its goal of fielding nuclear weapons. How those weapons will be used, as straight out rockets, as suitcase bombs passed off to its own terrorists, is of less concern than their intended target, Israel.

The regime of the Mullahs knows its own domestic weakness, which means their own internal clock is running down. Destroying Israel would not only fulfill their genocidal dreams, but allow them to claim the leadership of the Muslim world and with a weakened US, assert authority over much of the Middle East. That would strengthen the Mullahs at home, and allow them to bring in their foreign terrorist groups to suppress domestic dissent, without any interference from abroad. And if that was to mean a second genocide at home of some of Iran's pesky minorities, including the Azeri, having seen Iran's power, the world would fold its hands and do nothing.

While Iran plots military destruction, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Emirates continue the old Soviet line of sponsoring terrorists and engaging in the political demonization of Israel, backed by their hefty oil laden pocketbooks. With Mubarak's government no longer enjoying American support, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and Al Queda's parent organization, is now closer than ever to taking power in Egypt.

4. Domestic Politics

The splintering of Israel's political system has accelerated to a terrifying degree, particularly with the creation of Kadima. Both political corruption and party drift are now out of control. And the average man on the street has very little faith in the entire system.

Netanyahu has hammered together a coalition by going against his instincts and giving everyone a piece of pie, creating a bloated coalition with 30 ministers and assorted deputy ministers, prime ministers and vice prime ministers. This entire absurd pork pie hat of a government requires giving everyone a share in the budget, something no country could afford in a global economic crisis. Yet this form of government is virtually inevitable and follows in the footsteps of Sharon and Olmert who assembled similarly absurd coalitions.

While such a coalition, with the resulting infighting, may do for Netanyahu what it did for Sharon by providing him with a free hand, there is no real way that Netanyahu will be able to fight corruption or exercise financial discipline under this system. With public dissatisfaction already high, Netanyahu will have to make a difference quickly. And returning to his theme of financial reform in this situation will be virtually impossible.

The good news is that leaves him little outlet except to take bold steps against terrorism. The bad news is that if Netanyahu repeats his first term's mistakes of muddling along, waiting on Washington, and trying to take the middle road... it won't be very long before his coalition falls apart. And envoys from Washington, along with some CIA types, will be quick to come sniffing around some of the coalition partners promising them a good deal of US aid if they jump ship in favor of a Livni led government.

To survive that, Netanyahu must juggle the incompatible demands of hawks and doves, religious and secularist parties, whose party leaders really only care about one thing, the financial bottom line for their faction. He must balance one party against the other, always pointing to a potential replacement coalition partner, while somehow keeping the bunch of them from spending Israel dry... and do it under constant fire from the press, weathering manufactured corruption scandals created by a politicized left wing judiciary in concord with the media.

He'll have to do all that while dealing with strong dislike from the Israeli public which has never been able to trust him or connect emotionally to him. He'll have to do it all while resisting intense pressure from Washington and Brussels... fight a domestic insurgency backed by Iran and deal with Iranian nuclear weapons... even while even Iran enjoys inflated power from its ties to the Obama administration.

It would take a genius or a miracle worker, or just a plain miracle to pull all this off. Which means this is Netanyahu's chance to be Churchill or Chamberlain. And even Churchill couldn't survive the turmoil and irrationality of parliamentary politics without wartime exigencies at his back. Nor did Churchill ever have quite so many things against him from the very start.

And that is Netanyahu's challenge, his chance to soar or flame out... likely taking Israel with him. Netanyahu has flamed out before. Now he'll get the chance to show if he learned the lessons of his previous term. And the lives of millions hang in the balance.

In its early years the United Nations reflected the essential mindset and agenda of its Western creators, one that included support for Taiwan over Communist China, and South Korea over the DPK. It didn't take long however before the USSR swung the UN their way using Third World nations as the leverage. While the Third World could not control the Security Council, which mostly remained in the hands of key First World nations, the UN's agenda became a boondoggle of corruption, left wing politics and winks and nods to totalitarian regimes.

The USSR is gone now, but Islam as the new Communism is leveraging its power through the UN. While for many years the OIC, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, member states mainly focused on rejecting any human rights action against Muslim states, while pushing resolution after resolution condemning Israel. But increasingly the Muslim member states of the UN have begun feeling their oats, and the OIC co-founded by the two most radical Islamofascist Sunni states in the world, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, are demonstrating that they have bigger plans.

Directly implementing Sharia law in Western nations was once a pipe dream. While it has become more realistic in certain European nations, leveraging a Sharia agenda in the US as well as many other nations is a far trickier matter. Muslims remain a tiny minority in the United States and even aggressive Muslim immigration from Africa and the Middle East would be unable to outpace the larger tide of Hispanic and Asian immigrants coming to America. Meanwhile many European nations are having second thoughts about sacrificing their identity as secular republics on the human rights of their citizens, on the altar of appeasing Islam.

However directly implementing Sharia law is not the only option. The same Western liberals in Europe and America whose political ancestors worked to create the UN, have nurtured the dream of world government through the UN. In a template borrowed from H.G Wells' "Open Conspiracy", world government would evolve as a growing legal and political infrastructure before everyone's eyes. The irony however is that it may well evolve in a direction that Wells would have never accepted or expected. Toward Mecca.

The UN Human Rights Council, long ago hijacked and held hostage to a Muslim agenda, ignoring massacres and outright genocide perpetrated by Muslim member states such as Sudan, at the end of March passed a resolution calling on nations to control criticism of Islam. This continues the OIC agenda of equating Islamic law with human rights-- even when that law actually undermines human rights.

Like a virus that disguises itself by taking on the identity of the host's own antibodies, Islamofascism has learned to piggyback Islamic ideas on Western concepts. This 1984ish transposition of freedom and slavery, thus treats suppression of freedom as a "human right". It also neatly jibes with the willingness of Western liberals to treat some speech as illegal, marking it as incitement to violence. This paves the way for the very same people who tried to kill Salman Rushdie to redefine him as an "extremist", while they are his victims. By the UN's own rules.

And naturally the OIC, whose founding members are accountable for 75 percent of the world's terrorism, and whose parliamentary host nation Iran, is accountable for another 20 percent, have their own definition of "Terrorism". Islamophobia, they declared, is the worst form of terrorism.

Naturally. Peace is war. War is peace. Criticizing the human rights abusers, is a violation of human rights. Criticizing the terrorists, is the worst form of terrorism.

This sort of Orwellian perversity is almost absurd, except for the fact that it undeniably works. It has worked against Israel, transforming every act of self-defense against the terrorism they funded into a war crime. It is at work on the West now, eroding and rewriting the definition of human rights in a hooked Arabic script.

The OIC forms nearly a quarter of the UN's member states. And as Muslim nations fuel terrorist attacks and campaigns against non-Muslim states in the Middle East, Africa and Asia with the intent of forcibly making them Islamic-- that number will only keep rising. The Kosovar Jihad alone is set to bear fruit with yet one more addition to OIC gang. Nigeria, Kenya, Palestine, the Philippines, Thailand and many other states are on the chopping block as well. And where simple force will not yet work, UN diktat can and will.

That is because through the UN, Muslim states can do what they otherwise could not. Bring Islamic law into the hearth and homes, the courts and legislatures of civilized nations. They will come wrapped in more pleasing forms, written in language that will emphasize such buzzwords as "human rights", "harmony", "multiculturalism" and "co-existance". And they will mean them in the same way that in Oceania, peace really meant peace, rather than war.

Using the UN to change American and European laws will be a case of the tail wagging the dog. But as the USSR demonstrated, the fallacy of the UN is that it a democratic representation of undemocratic and outright antidemocratic states. The OIC does not have right or law on its side, but it does have numbers. And the dreaming socialists who thought once that the UN would bring about a united world government may be right, but it will not be one of men in business suits playing with a global version of the EU. The numbers game alone says otherwise. One religion has a sizable unified majority in the UN and is driven to force that religion on all the rest of us. And so long as we bow to the UN, we may one day find ourselves bowing to Mecca instead.

The creation of Open for Questions, a new White House website allowing the "public" to vote on questions they want to hear asked is yet another step by the Obama Administration away from the press and toward keeping Obama in his own bubble of celebrity coverage and rigged social networking.

The Obama campaign displayed a great of facility in exploiting social networking to compulsively promote their man, while conducting hate campaigns against Hillary Clinton, McCain and Palin. Often this consisted of decentralizing the attack machine in order to remove accountability from Obama's people. Typical of this was Obama's first attack ad against Hillary, uploaded to YouTube by an employee of a firm working on Obama's campaign as a "viral video" and featuring a tyrannical Hillary Clinton confronted by an Obama supporter, in a remake of a famous Apple TV commercial. Obama denied having anything to do with the attack ad, and the lapdog media eagerly lapped up his absurd claim that he lacked the resources to produce the ad.

This was to be a pattern for the campaign. Obama adeptly exploited social networking, but it was a rigged shell game. Back in July of last year I noted that Obama's online support was stacked with phony names, multiple identities and foreigners posing as Americans while claiming at once to be Catholics, Jews, Asian-Americans, Iowa Latinos and DC Lawyers.

It is now clear that Obama's campaign tactics are becoming a permanent part of his administration. And though the press has eagerly supported him, with support growing shaky during the economic downturn, Obama is sidelining the press, avoiding open questions and pushing more of his rigged social networking shell game.

Obama has lately begun talking about needing to address the public without the "filter" of the press corps. Naturally what that really means is he wants one way communication with the public, without getting any actual questions in return. It's behind his constant TV appearances, pre-empting prime time programming and going on Leno. However America isn't quite ready for a celebrity version of Castro or Kim Jong Il.

Social networking efforts such as Open for Questions give Obama the illusion of discarding the press in favor of a populist social media approach to the public. Why put up with the stuffy old press when anyone can ask and vote on questions that Obama himself 'may' answer? The answer of course is that a shell game is rigged so that the house always wins. Obama's social networking is a shell game, and the White House trying to displace the press with questions from a website that they control, selected through a rigged process by Obama's own supporters is not democracy or transparency. Instead it's a digital version of Chavezocracy.

Because as Obama has demonstrated time and time again, the only people allowed to ask him questions in "open forums", are his own supporters. So too the Washington Post identified the five named people who asked Obama questions as the "White House Town Hall" as being Obama supporters and donors... one even served as an advisor on Obama's platform committee That is Obama's idea of an "open forum", one in which his supporters ask him tough questions such as "I want to know more about health care". This of course is nothing but a charade masquerading as the democracy of a town hall meeting. But it's typical of Obama's people to use the language of democracy to disguise their carefully controlled echo chamber.

Obama has repeatedly demonstrated his paranoia when it comes to the press, kicking reporters from newspapers that did not endorse him off his campaign plane, turning press conferences into a charade favoring representatives of far left wing publications such as the Huffington Post and even locking the press out of an event in which he received an award from a newspaper association. Behind those actions is a control freak, who despite the media's adoration for him, cannot trust what he does not completely control.

Obama's people know that they are and will be taking increasingly controversial steps, the backlash from which requires them to manage information and sideline the press in favor of centralized propaganda. Social networking can serve to create the illusion of popular support while suppressing dissent. And sidelining the press in favor of YouTube or a White House hosted version of Digg allows Obama to claim a democratic mantle by championing populism, even if it is a populism that he tightly control.

Obama's campaign succeeded by playing one of many shell games with democracy, substituting manufactured populism for authentic debate. And as the campaign goes, so goes the administration, except that the administration is taking the campaign's tactics and multiplying them several times over. If Obama succeeds, America will have traded in open government for the rule of a mob of supporters at the gates of government in a charade reminiscent of the dying days of the Roman Empire.

The life and death of a civilization is a good deal like the life and death of an individual organism. Between birth and death, the lifecycle moves steadily toward degeneration and death. The length of that lifecycle however is determined by the behavior of the organism. The organism can behave in ways that extends its lifespan or in ways that cut it short. And so can a civilization.

There are of course catastrophic forms of death for both a living organism and a civilization. But setting those aside, the lifecycles of both move from a vigorous youth, toward an increasingly ambivalent middle age, followed by degeneration and death. For a living organism, degeneration follows as the body becomes increasingly incapable of flushing the toxins that are byproducts of its normal functioning... and from copying errors in its DNA.

A living system is one whose parts organically replace themselves when they wear out. The human body replaces its cells over and over again throughout a person's lifetime. Every seven years the human body has replenished itself anew. We can think of this as akin to a generation in a civilization. By that measurement, the United States of America as an independent nation is in its late eighties. Almost a century if you count colonial times. Most of Europe is a good deal older. Israel is a confused 13 year old. Australia is a late twenty something, looking toward its thirties.

But all of these countries are suffering from fairly similar maladies, call it a virus, the black death, the Influenza pandemic that swept a bloody scythe in the 1920's. And their prognosis' are looking fairly grim.

The first problem is fairly obvious, flushing the toxins. Toxins build up naturally in the human body. As the body grows older, it becomes less capable of flushing those toxins out of its system. Crime is one such obvious toxin. So is illegal immigration. Political corruption, just to name a third. Each is a normal byproduct of a civilization's functioning. In a health civilization, they can be controlled and flushed out when they become dangerous. In a weakened state however, they poison and sicken the body politic, and can even contribute to killing it.

Secondly there is the DNA copying problem. To reproduce its sub-parts a living organism needs to make accurate copies of them. In a civilization that means passing down core laws, beliefs and practices from generation to generation. In a living organism, multiple copies produce increasingly error prone copies, much like a game of broken telephone does. The bad copies can then result in mutated cells, cancers and failures. In a civilization, bad copies of its values and principles can mean a generation raised on mutated beliefs, that allows cancers to thrive within the body politic.

We might look at the United States Constitution as an example of the nation's core DNA. The information that each generation needs to successfully replicate the United States of America. From generation to generation, what we've been doing is making copies of the Constitution. You might protest that we have the original copies on display in their specific wording. However that really doesn't matter, because every generation has "interpreted" the Constitution in ways relevant to its own agendas and understanding. This has led to copying errors in our national DNA. Each succeeding re-interpretation of the Constitution has been an increasingly mutated one, resulting in an increasingly mutated understanding of American law and government.

Of course no civilization, like no living organism, can exist forever. But the lives of our civilizations are imperiled through a combination of factors.

First of all, we have become increasingly incapable of flushing our toxins. The resulting toxic buildup is doing severe damage to our basic systems, and each toxin is not an isolated problem, but are intertwined. Immigration continues to drive crime. Political corruption drives immigration. Islamic terrorism depends on all three.

Secondly, copying errors have led to the loss of our ideals. We are living in a system in which cancerous cells thrive, and healthy ones are attacked by a dysfunctional immune system which has been hijacked to function in a diseased organism. The loss of meaning has corrupted and inverted our political system, making it cancerous. And our political immune systems, the press, law enforcement and academia, are working to fight healthy cells, while letting diseased cells through, and generating even more extreme copying errors.

Third of all, we are under attack by a virus known as Islam. This has occurred even while we are already succumbing to the virus of socialism, one we have been fighting for well over a century, 28 years in human cellular generations. This virus has corrupted our DNA quite badly, resulting in a dysfunctional immune system and a body at war with itself.

If our civilizations were healthy, the Islamic virus would pose no threat. But in our current weakened state, the effect is similar to that of a man with a damaged immune system coming down with the flu. What might be a mild problem to a healthy organism, is fatal to a weakened organism.

This trinity of problems highlight what we are suffering now, as well as the solution. To survive we must restore our DNA to a clean, or at least a cleaner copy. We must rebuild our immune systems to begin fighting the diseased cells and to repel the external viruses. That means rebooting our national ideals, laws and government to a clean state in order to compensate for the copying errors. With that as the bellwether, we can then clearly divide cells into healthy and diseased ones, and begin treating any part of the immune system that attacks healthy cells, as rogue and cancerous... and destroy it.

No civilization lives forever, but what we are undergoing now is not natural, instead a particular political species, one that has shown a great ability to cultivate knowledge, be technologically and creatively productive, is under attack from without and within. And should it perish, ultimately the diseased cells will die with the healthy. For like the virus that kills its host, only to die in turn, the destructive force means death even to itself. While the living organism represents the future of the world.

Barry Hussein has unveiled his "brand new plan" for winning the war in Afghanistan, to wide praise from the very same media corps that not so long ago was castigating the war at every opportunity and repeating Noam Chomsky's talking points.

Key features of the bright shiny new plan. Karzai is gone. Obama blasted the Afghan government and it's clear that a stable Afghani government is no longer part of the package. Oddly enough the liberal media is busy heaping praise on Obama for essentially sacrificing the lives and rights of millions of women to the Taliban, and throwing out the hard work and sacrifices of tens of thousands of American and international soldiers.

Make no mistake about it, for all the bravado, Obama's plan is just a prelude to the helicopters over the embassy, and the screaming refugees begging to be let in beyond the gates.

Obama has already made it part of his initiative to reach out to the "moderate" Taliban. Biden has announced that only 5 percent of the Taliban are incorrigble. The other 95 percent we can work with.

In his brand new plan, Obama offered Pakistan, which funded and set up the Taliban, a velvet glove, and Karzai's government, the iron fist. The message is fairly clear, Karzai is out, and the Taliban are in. So long as they promise to go back to their Clinton era arrangements on drugs and terrorism-- the same arrangements they didn't keep last time around, Obama and his corrupt band of criminals, will let them take over Afghanistan again.

It's bad a plan, but it's exactly what we can expect from the likes of Sandy Berger and James L. Jones. And it shows that Chas Freeman's contempt for human rights made him perfectly suited for the job, rather than some sort of aberration.

For now the plans calls for lots of aid money and lots more diplobrats in Afghanistan, 450 more of them, all to work with Afghanis, who no longer have any reason to work with us. With Obama's new plan, Afghanistan is now divided into a former US backed government we just sold out, whose leaders will be either prepearing for a long solitary campaign as a renewed Northern Alliance, and the Taliban, which will continue hitting US troops while conducting backchannel negotiations with the diplobrats urging us to leave sooner.

This even as Obama is working on releasing the Gitmo terrorists into the US, while giving them welfare.

All the ingredients are in place for a terrorist attack far worse than 9/11. Obama's plan shamelessly praised by the media will deliver some kills, followed by a withdrawal. Obama will hang his own Mission Accomplished banner, even as Taliban thugs are beating and killing girls again.

Substitute Iran for the Taliban, and that is his plan for Iraq. Substitute Hamas for both, and that's his plan for Israel.

Obama is bringing back the Clinton era politics of appeasement, this time with an emphasis on pandering to Muslim terrorists. And it's gonna be bad, folks. It's gonna be real bad.

Meanwhile the Democrat attack machine is targeting Chief Justice Roberts, his willingness to listen to questions about Obama's legitimacy to hold office can't be helping.

In the blog roundup, Barcepundit has some interesting facts on the Cost of Green, and what Obama's green centered plans will really do for job creation.

Subsidizing renewable energy in the U.S. may destroy two jobs for every one created if Spain’s experience with windmills and solar farms is any guide.

For every new position that depends on energy price supports, at least 2.2 jobs in other industries will disappear, according to a study from King Juan Carlos University in Madrid.

And the numbers in the US will probably be worse.

Ted Belman at Israpundit has another look at how terrorists control the ground level UNRWA functioning, at the UNRWA union elections.

Significantly, Islamist candidates won all 11 seats reserved for teachers.

In the elections for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) union in Gaza, held Wednesday, the Hamas-controlled Islamist bloc won 17 out of 27 seats. PLO-affiliated factions won nine seats, with the last seat going to an independent candidate.

Go read more for a detailed commentary and context, but the bottom line is the UNRWA is really a Hamas\Fatah operation on the ground, with a handful of foreigners pretending they're in charge for the cameras.

Seeing Right has Rush Limbaugh's take on 1984 and Obama.

…Big Brother was everywhere, no matter where you went. Big Brother was on television, on the radio. It didn’t matter where you went. I have a simple question. When do all television sets just eventually default to the Obama channel? There has to be an Obama channel now, and at some point the government, the FCC, is gonna encode broadcast signals so that your TV or your receiver defaults to the Obama channel all the time. It’s the same thing with your computer defaulting to the Obama page.

Except of course now every channel is the Obama channel, and every magazine is the Obama magazine. Thus insuring that you can't turn it off, because wherever you go, the propaganda is already there.

Seeing Right also has some additional commentary on yesterday's post from here.

Ms Placed Democrat takes a look at Russia's military buildup

Apparently Hillary’s “overcharge button” didn’t really signal any change between Bambi’s administration and Russia, nor impress Russia much. With Bambi’s talk becoming increasingly weaker with phrases like “man made disasters” instead of terrorist attacks, removing “war on terror” from the vernacular and ridding the current dictionary of the term “enemy combatant”, Russia is showing us their might.

On that note, the week end.

Andrei Illarionov held many senior Russian government positions, including Putin's senior economic advisor and the President's personal representative to the G8 economic summit.

Last month Illarionov, having resigned from his duties, testified before Congress on the state of Russia, describing how a country that most, including its citizens, thought was transitioning from tyranny to democracy, had made the transition to becoming a tyranny again.

I have excerpted a few key points in his testimony that are relevant not only to Russia, but to the future of the United States as a democratic country. Because what has happened in Russia, could happen here too. It might have happened already.

Today’s Russia is not a democratic country. The international human rights organization Freedom House assigns "Not Free" status to Russia since 2004 for each of the last 5 years. According to the classification of the political regimes, the current one in Russia should be considered as hard authoritarianism. The central place in the Russian political system is occupied by the Corporation of the secret police.

The personnel of Federal Security Service — both in active service as well as retired one — form a special type of unity (non-necessarily institutionalized) that can be called brotherhood, order, or corporation. The Corporation of the secret police operatives (CSP) includes first of all acting and former officers of the FSB (former KGB).

CSP and the Russian society

Members of the CSP are specially trained, strongly motivated and mentally oriented to use force against other people and in this regard differ substantially from civilians. The important distinction of enforcement in today’s Russia from enforcement in rule-based nations is that in the former case it doesn’t necessarily imply enforcement of Law. It means solely enforcement of Power and Force regardless of Law, quite often against Law. Members of the Corporation are trained and inspired with the superiority complex over the rest of the population. Members of the Corporation exude a sense of being the bosses that superior to other people who are not members of the CSP. They are equipped with membership perks, including two most tangible instruments conferring real power over the rest of population in today’s Russia — the FSB IDs and the right to carry and use weapons.

Capture of State Power by the CSP

Since ascension of Vladimir Putin to power the members of the CSP have infiltrated all branches of power in Russia. According to the Olga Kryshtanovskaya’s study up to 77% of the 1016 top government positions have been taken by people with security background (26% with openly stated affiliation to different enforcement agencies and other 51% with hidden affiliation). Main bodies of the Russian state (Presidential Administration, Government apparatus, Tax agency, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Defense, Parliament, Court system) as well as main business groups and most important mass-media outlets have been captured by the CSP. Since the members of the CSP have taken key positions in the most important institutions of the state, business groups, media channels, almost all valuable resources available in the society (political, executive, legal, judicial, enforcement, military, economic, financial, media) have been concentrated and in many cases monopolized in the hands of the CSP.

Mass Media

Independent mass media in Russia virtually does not exist. The TV channels, radio, printed media are heavily censored with government propaganda

Electoral System

Since 1999 there is no free, open, competitive parliamentary or presidential election in Russia. The last two elections — the parliamentary one in December 2007 and presidential one in March 2008 — have been conducted as special operations and been heavily rigged with at least 20 mln ballots in each case stuffed in favor of the regime candidates. None of the opposition political parties or opposition politicians has been allowed either to participate in the elections, or even to be registered at the Ministry of Justice.

The key to Russia's transition from democracy under Yeltsin to tyranny under Putin was to exploit a crisis, and use a dedicated corps to take control of branch after branch of government at all levels of authority, proceeding then to eliminate independent media outlets and political opposition.

The crisis was twofold, first Russia's economic disaster that was blamed on an excessively deregulated free market and the heads of various corporations. Secondly the disastrous war against Islamic terrorists in Chechnya, and an attempt to intervene in Yugoslavia to prevent the rise of a Muslim Albanian state in Kosovo.

An economic crisis blamed on deregulation and two wars against Muslim terrorists. Sound familiar yet?

Widely blamed for economic corruption and military failures, Yeltsin resigned turning over the government to Ex-KGB man Putin. Putin's solution to Russia's economic problems was nationalization.

Putin's regime forcibly and fraudulently seized a number of corporations, most prominently Gazprom, while conducting a smear campaign against their executives. Some were jailed, when they attempted to appeal, their lawyers were jailed too. He removed local representation, appointing State Governors personally. Power was centralized through him.

For this Putin was hailed as a reformer fighting for the people, who had brought stability to Russia. Using the seized loot of nationalized corporations, he created a network composed of KGB and ex-KGB personnel who now control most of Russia's political and business infrastructure. Much of Russia's wealth was siphoned away as bribes to them.

The press was not openly nationalized, but it was ruthlessly winnowed. The media ceaselessly chant praise of Putin. Opposition outlets have been taken over or shut down. Journalists who dissent are beaten and eventually killed, if they don't get the message. The media speaks in one voice.

Putin's advisors created Nashi "Ours", officially the "Youth Democratic Anti-Fascist Movement", a youth corps personally loyal to Putin and his agenda. With the passage of HR 1388, the (GIVE) Act, or as one subtitle is labeled with no trace of irony, (Learn and Serve America) ,only the comma before America is missing-- it's worth taking a look at how the Russian version works.

It's official. To be patriotic in Russia is to be a fan of Putin, specifically a Putin Youth.

“The idea was to create an ideology based on a total devotion to the president and his course,” says a Kremlin adviser, Sergei Markov.

While their methods are still mostly street theater, it’s probably only a matter of time before they graduate to more serious violence. Indeed, their recruiting boot camps feature paramilitary training to fight against fascists

Another deeply disturbing government initiative is labeling critics “extremists” and criminals, another tactic of all serious totalitarian states. When you can criminalize criticism of the government, there is nothing you can’t get away with, and all remaining freedoms are hanging by a thread.

Now officially Nashi looks almost benevolent, a service corps of youth volunteers that aids the sick and disabled, provides information, aids the birth rate and meets with political leaders. In return its "volunteers" receive college educations followed by careers in politics and the Russian bureaucracy. It looks a lot like the vision for a youth service corps embedded in HR 1388.

Of course the real purpose of Nashi is a national corps of volunteers combating "fascism". Fascists being anyone who criticizes Putin. Their guiding principle is an obsessive devotion to Putin. Their ultimate purpose is to form the next government party, one composed of men and women completely obedient to Putin, membership in which is compulsory for government service.

It is fascinating to see this reverse engineered version of the Communist and Nazi parties. It's also horrifying because the ingredients are in place for the same process to be applied to the United States.

Obama rose to power to power based on an economic crisis and two wars. His response to the crisis is to push nationalization and centralization, backed by a cult of personality. His advisors are determined to leverage this crisis to transform him into a savior, to be given credit for ending an economic depression, followed by giving him virtually unlimited power.

Obama already has widespread media worship, but his paranoid control over the press makes it clear that he isn't satisfied with anything but total power. Hence the early campaign against Rush Limbaugh and then CNBC figures who criticized him. Like Putin, you can't support Obama 75 percent of the time. You must support him 100 percent of the time, or keep your mouth shut.

If Obama's plans come to pass, the casualties will be independent businesses which will be given the choice between serving as Obama supporters, their CEO's serving a role similar to that of Putin's pet oligarchs, and state governments, which will become unable to meet their debts and expenses, and will be taken over by Federally appointed caretakers that will become Governors in all but name.

The youth corps would serve as the final element. HR 1388 calls for integrating them into every academic and learning environment, including private schools. It calls for treating "service based learning" as a fundamental part of every curriculum, from cradle to university. It lays out specific guidelines and the bare bones of a far larger plan with campuses and superintendents, with a 6 billion dollar price tag, over Obama's first term.

Will this really happen here? It might. The future isn't set and there are many variables, but we are moving along a similar road and it behooves us to take a look at what happened in Russia, because contrary to what many believe, it can happen here.

Throughout the 20th century, power has increasingly moved out of the hands of the American people and into the hands of local and national bureaucracies. Tax rates have climbed in order to fund the constant expansion of government, which in turn has placed more and more government demands on the average person.

The problem is not the left's phantom military-industrial complex, but the very real balance beam between corporations and government, that are likely to end the same way they did in Europe or Russia. With the bureaucracy co-opting corporations into government rule.

Law enforcement has gained more authority over a general public that now reflexively defers to their power, and feels inept and unable to engage in any form of self-defense. Answering to authority, a reflex once described as foreign to Americans by Lafayette, is now a commonplace part of daily life.

Independent thought has become increasingly absent, people get their opinions from the corporate media and from the wider celebrity oriented discourse, that helped push Obama to the top. People have stopped listening and they have stopped thinking. Many have also stopped believing. Values have become degraded, religion has become entertainment with celebrity preachers and rabbis mixing pop culture populism with feel good advice. The difference between right and wrong, propriety and impropriety, selflessness and selfishness is no longer apparent to most people.

All the conditions are there for implementing authoritarian rule. And all the conditions are also there for the people to wake and restore America as a government of the people and by the people, that governs the people least. Which way the pendulum will swing, may determine where a decade from now former top American political figures are giving testimony somewhere abroad about how America ceased to be a free nation.

J Street, the pro Hamas lobby funded by George Soros, which nevertheless insists on referring to itself as Pro-Israel though its only relationship with Israel is a consistently hostile one, not being satisfied with releasing a phony Jewish survey claiming that American Jews back their agenda, launched a vicious attack on a Jewish woman who called for Israel to start fighting terrorism.

First the J Street poll, which far too many Jewish blogs and outlets are taking seriously. The J Street poll was set up by Gerstein Agne Strategic Communications. That may sound like a generic name, but in fact it's a hard left wing group, both of whose founders Jim Gerstein and Karl Agne are also the Executive Director and Senior Adviser for Democracy Corps, part of the George Soros machine, whose mission was and is distributing biased polling data to fit the Obama campaign's talking points and agenda. Naturally the Gerstein Agne J Street poll was filled with distortions and bias to ensure the desired political outcome.

Fresh off that scam, J Street has proceeded to launch a hate campaign against Nadia Matar of Women in Green, who spoke at the Safra Synagogue and called for Israel to win the war against terrorism.

"We must kill the terrorist leaders, starting with Mahmoud Abbas and all the others. Nobody had any qualms in destroying the Nazi regime, we have to abolish the Oslo agreements, there is no difference between the PA, the Hamas, the Islamic Jihad, whatever names they have. They're all terrorists and we cannot have peace with them."

J Street instantly distributed a letter accusing her of violent incitement, because apparently calling for your government to fight terrorism is now violent incitement, according to this Pro-Hamas lobby. J Street quickly gained a craven apology from Rabbi Elie Abadie, previously a decent man, and his promise to never allow AFSI to use his synagogue again. Not satisfied with bullying a house of worship, the Pro-Hamas J Street thugs then went after AFSI, Americans For a Safe Israel, the event's sponsors, demanding that they in turn "renounce" her "violent incitement".

Of course J Street are actually big fans of "violent incitement" by terrorists and their supporters in favor of killing Jews, whether it's by Hamas, Abbas or at Durban. What they're not in favor is Jews talking about fighting back, as Nadia Matar did. Their agenda, along with the far left, has been to crush any idea of resistance to terrorism.

Nadia Matar called for a change in Israel's policy toward terrorism, from submission to resistance. J Street's campaign against her, AFSI and the Safra Synagogue is nothing more than a shameless attempt to terrorize and silence Pro-Israel views. Not satisfied with merely co-opting a Jewish agenda in favor of their Pro-Hamas agenda, J Street is working to silence any dissent from a pro-terrorist position.

Let's contrast Matar's response with genuine incitement to violence from Abbas' terrorist regime.

Voice of Palestine Radio, the official voice of Mahmoud Abbas's
Palestinian Authority, declared Sunday night that both of today's attacks on
Israelis were carried out by members of the Fatah organization headed by PLO
leader Abbas.

At least three people were murdered and another five wounded-including
women and children-- in the two drive-by shooting attacks that took place
within minutes of one another: one on a group of civilians at a bus-stop
south of Bethlehem, the other on the road between Jerusalem and Nablus.

That's what actual "incitement to violence" looks like.

These are the names of only two of Abbas' victims on that day.

Kineret Mandel, 21 years old.

Matat Adler, 22 years old.

This is how they died. This is how Abbas' men murdered them.

Returning to Carmel, Kineret and her newlywed cousin, Matat Rosenfeld-Adler, were waiting at the Gush Etzion junction for a ride home. A car from Carmel drove past and picked up hitchhikers, but there was no room for the two young women. A few minutes later, they were killed in the attack along with Oz Ben-Meir and three others were wounded.

The names go on and on and so does the list. And month after month the list grows, as Abbas' Fatah thugs continue killing innocent people.

This is what "incitement to violence" really looks like.

ON the very day that five Israelis were murdered and over 60 injured outside a shopping mall in the coastal city of Netanya earlier this month, the official Palestinian newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadida reported that Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas had approved fresh financial assistance to the families of suicide bombers. The family of each “martyr” will now receive a monthly stipend of at least $250 – a not inconsiderable amount for most Palestinians – from the Palestinian Authority. Altogether, the families of these so-called martyrs and of those wounded in terrorist attempts or held in Israeli jails might receive $100 million, according to Al-Hayat Al-Jadida.

100 million dollars worth of incitement. Or this.

A typical instance is the elevation of Al-Moayed Bihokmillah Al-Agha, who murdered five Israelis in a suicide bombing in December 2004. When the Rafah crossing, the scene of his terror attack, was re-opened at the start of this month, the Palestinian Authority renamed it “in honor of Shahid (martyr) Al-Agha.” Then there is the soccer tournament named in honor of the terrorist who murdered 30 people at a Passover celebration in Netanya, or the girls’ high school named by the Palestinian Authority Ministry of Education after a female terrorist who murdered 36 Israeli civilians and an American nature photographer. (The school was recently renovated with money from USAID, channeled through the American Near East Refugee Aid.)

This is what Abbas has been doing over and over again. Last week Abbas' terrorists plotted to murder diners at a restaurant with an odorless, tasteless, slow release poison to maximize casualties. That's not incitement to violence. Just violence. Plain and simple. The violence that left wing groups such as Peace Now, ISM and J Street support by repeatedly pressuring Israel and the US to stop fighting terrorism and to continue rewarding terrorists like Abbas with aid, with weapons and with territory to continue their crimes.

This is what anyone who supports J Street and redistributes their materials supports.

What Nadia Matar is guilty of is speaking the truth, and calling for an end to the violence, by calling for an end to the terrorist leaders responsible for the violence. Rabbi Elie Abadie's pathetic apology for letting a pro-Israel group hold an event in his synagogue is despicable. It is not consistent with the beliefs of Israel's Sephardic Chief Rabbis and Leaders. It is plain and simple toadying before J Street, a Pro-Hamas hate group calling itself a Pro-Israel lobby.

In the 1930's, calls to fight Hitler were meant with threats and intimidation by the official liberal Jewish leadership toadying to FDR. Today calls to fight terrorists are met with threats and intimidation not only by the official liberal Jewish leadership toadying to Obama, but by the radical left's groups such as J Street which find the mainstream liberal leadership, not radically anti-Jewish enough.

Feel free to make your views clear in support of fighting terrorism and free speech to Rabbi Elie Abadie at the Safra Synagogue or to AFSI to Barry Freedman. I wouldn't waste my time mailing anything to J Street, unless it's a one way ticket to Tehran.

Resistance to Terrorism saves lives and is the only hope for the survival of both America and Israel.

A clash of civilizations is at the heart of it a clash of allegiances, for a civilization is defined by its pattern of allegiances. Therefore the clash between Islam and the West, is also the clash between what we give allegiance to and what they give allegiance to. It is also one of the best demonstrations of why Islam is incompatible with Western democracies.

Western nations expect Muslim immigrants to live by a code that separates civil and religious laws. The Western system assumes that Muslims will accept a division between the political and the religion, relegating religion to the mosque, while otherwise being Englishmen, Frenchmen and Americans. This concept however is innately foreign to the Muslim mind.

Nationalism in the Muslim world remains a far weaker force than religion and tribal kinship. That is why the post-Saddam Iraq so easily unwound into extended bloody bouts between Sunnis and Shiites. Most Muslim nations are in any case artificial, Egypt, Pakistan, Syria, the Kingdom of Jordan and their like were the products or the afterbirth of European colonialism. Their rulers may cultivate nationalism, but such nationalism is only skin deep.

That is why when Israelis point out that Palestine is an artificial entity, the average Arab will only shrug. He knows quite well that just about any country in the Muslim world is an artificial entity, a set of borders drawn out by England or France or a UN mediator with an ancient name thrown into the bargain. The Muslim has only a short term national history, often under Western backed dictators, or a very long one to the romanticized glory days of ancient history. He does not care nearly as much for his nations, as he does for his religion.

Mohammed's real achievement was to take the Arab tribal system and transcend it with a higher identity, that of Muslim. The resulting wave of bloody conquests would not have been possible without that Muslim identity. And that is the problem now facing the West.

Nationalism among Muslims is a very shallow thing at best, as Iraq has shown. And that nationalism is primarily based on tribal kinship. Yet Western countries seriously expect to convince their Muslim immigrants to give equal weight to being French, English or Dutch or American, as to being Muslim. The idea is all the more absurd, because tribal kinship, the family relationships that underlie political loyalties in the Muslim world, are absent here. Muslim immigrants have no familial ties to the political structures of Western countries. Which means that the prospects of expecting them to identity with those countries are virtually nil.

In trying to integrate Muslim immigrants, Western countries find themselves pitted against the Mohammed's Ghost. Mohammed's supreme idea was that Islam demanded complete submission, transcending all tribal and political bonds. Our supreme idea is that political representation allows law to coexist with human freedom.

The two supreme ideas of Islam and the West are naturally incompatible. Muslims view all political laws as corrupt and Allah's law alone as transcendent. The West preserves political and civil rights by separating civil and religious laws into separate spheres. That is not a compromise that Muslims can truly understand or respect. For all intents and purposes, both sides are speaking different political languages that represent two radically different viewpoints.

Our relationships with Muslim countries are based on tribal ties. When we ask one Muslim country to side with us against another Muslim country, we try to outweigh religious ties with tribal ones, something that naturally touches off a domestic backlash from the general Muslim population. The leaders of the Arab world generally understand the necessity of driving out a Saddam or opposing Iran's nuclear development program, in their own self-interest. But tribal bonds within a country are narrow because only a small portion of the population has direct ties to the government, religious ones however are very wide because most of the population is Muslim.

The same problem recurs in the West with Muslim immigrants, except this time our political system, to which they have no allegiance, is pitted against the network of Mosques and their various Imams and religious leaders. It's no surprise that the West will always lose their showdown for the hearts and minds.

The problem is simple enough. The West provides opportunities for Muslims in the West to find jobs, homes, schools and everything that's considered part of the good life. It assumes that this will produce a natural loyalty. That assumption, like many others, is dead wrong. Political tribalism in the Muslim world ladles out employment and other opportunities based on familial connections and as a reward for loyalty. We "give away" the currency of political tribalism, and in turn wind up treated with contempt by the people we've given everything to, with no loyalty asked for in return.

Yet even were we to do things the way they're done in the Third World, it would only make a limited difference. To give up our political system for political tribalism would only further diminish us, and it would not deal with the problem of Mohammed's Ghost. The Islamic Will to Power is rooted in embracing the "transcendence" of Mohammed's perfect law, over the corrupt political laws of governments. Since we cannot declare our political laws to be religious, not without creating our own Mohammeds', and we cannot sell the freedoms that we have already given away to win their tribal loyalty, the problem remains an irresolvable one.

And each time we insist that there is no contradiction between being a Muslim and being a Frenchmen, a Brit or an America-- we make it that much worse. For Islam insists that there is a contradiction, even as we insist that there is none. Having given up our claim, the Western Muslim naturally moves to appease the cleric by resolving any contradictions between Islam and Western society; in Islam's favor. And thus the moderate Muslim becomes a Jihadist enabler, if not a Jihadist himself.

Given enough centuries of residence, the problem might resolve itself. If Islam did not insist on conquering infidels by the sword, but merely on separatism, the problem would be mainly a social one. If Muslims were not swiftly moving from minorities to majorities across Europe, there might still be time. Unfortunately there is very little time left before Europe becomes Eurabia, and much of the rest of the world will follow. The toxic combination of Saudi wealth, a booming birth rate, a decaying West and the industrialized secularism of the First World colliding with the fanatical determinism of the Muslim world, leaves only two ways for this clash of civilizations to end.

One idea, one way of life must win. The other must lose. The great question being decided now in our words and deeds, is which will stand and which will fall.

Outwardly the situation looks bad. Republican party identification is down. The White House and Congress are in the hands of far left Democrats. The Republican party appears to be drifting aimlessly without direction during a national crisis.

And it is bad, but not for the reasons we think. And more importantly, it's an opportunity. A wake up call.

The 2008 Presidential election was a shock to the system, because it wasn't the kind of national election that was supposed to happen in America. The popular wisdom went, that agree or disagree with a candidate, but whichever party he represented we could assume that he would be a serious and fully qualified candidate.

Instead the 2008 election was won through massive voter fraud, racial identity politics, cults of personality and mass media propaganda. This kind of thing wasn't supposed to happen in America. Latin America maybe or Europe, but not here. We don't do this kind of thing, we thought. We don't name schools after newly appointed leaders. We don't have worship press coverage of a candidate. We don't have an election where the fraud is so shameless and open that no one thinks twice about it anymore.

Except that we do. And we did.

As shocking as 2008 was to so many people, it didn't come out of thin air. The 2008 campaign was a radical leap, one that had been carefully planned and structured many years ahead. But everything that Obama and his people did, was built on existing structures and precedents. It was shocking only because for the first time, the masks had come off.

2008 was a slap in the face but it was one we needed, just like a car accident victim may need it to avoid falling into a coma. For almost a century America had been boiling slowly in a pot, the temperature rising gradually enough so the change wasn't too alarming. When the temperature changed too suddenly though in the 60's, it was a shock to the system that no one could miss. 2008 was another shock to the system because the slowly rising temperature suddenly went up a lot faster. We're no longer at 80 degrees. Suddenly we're at 102. And we can smell the burning flesh.

Like the 60's, 2008 was a wake up call, showing us just how much power the left had accumulated and what they intend to do with it. We can see now what an America remade in their ideological image will look like. And beneath all that are the root causes of why.

The 60's was a show of cultural and political power by the left. The political power imploded, but the cultural power remained which moved America much further to the left. The American consensus changed. The unacceptable became acceptable. Republicans and Democrats both became far more liberal than they had ever been. The country seemed to become more conservative, but that was only by comparison to the leftist explosion that had come before. But in contrast to what had been all along, the country had swung further to the left than ever.

The cultural dominance of the left had become a fact, in education, in literature, in film and all forms of popular culture that were twisted to repeat a leftist message. The radicals may have put on suits, but they only did so to gain more power and control. In 2008 they showed us just how much control they had accumulated and what they intended to do with it. And most importantly they showed us just how they had changed America.

If the economy continues to malinger in ways that upbeat media coverage can't cover up, the Republican party might begin winning Congressional seats in 2010 and maybe even win a national election in 2012.

But it will still be as much defeat, as victory. A "new" rebranded Republican party that tries to imitate Obama, pander aimlessly and be nothing more than a paler version of the Democratic Party, will be a moral and ultimately a political defeat for all of us.

2008 could not have happened without a consistent willingness by Republicans to steadily move to the left. A victory in 2012 that paves the way for a much worse repetition of 2008 in 2016 or 2022 will be a case of winning the battle and losing the war.

There are two possible lessons to learn from a political defeat. One is to try and be more like your opponent. The other is to offer a sharp and consistent contrast to him. The first may succeed in the short term, but will always lose in the long run. The second may lose in the short term, but offers the chance for an enduring victory in the long run.

The Republican party cannot have its own Obama, and wishing for one in the form of Jindal or Steele will result only in mockery and failure. We don't need our own Obama. We need our own Roosevelt or our own Reagan, not as hollow imitations, but as models of leadership. As reminders that we should not run from who we are, but embrace it and raise it high as a banner overhead.

In the words of George Washington, "Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair; the rest is in the hands of God"

The country has been moved to the left, but that is an artificial motion. Country by county, Americans remain fundamentally conservative. Conservative ideas about freedom, responsibility,war and government resonate far more with the average American. That however is changing as each generation grows up with a consensus that has been pushed further to the left, is thrust into an educational system governed by left wing paradigms and is exposed to a popular culture aggressively working to imprint him or her with ideas derived from left wing ideology-- treated as national morality.

It means that time is running out. 2008 was a wake up call showing just how close to the darkest hour of midnight we are. We aren't finished yet, but there are only so many chances left. Our institutions have been corrupted, our culture has been hijacked, our country has been hijacked. The toxins accumulating in the body of the nation will kill it, given time.

2008 was a sign that the walls had come down, the old consensuses we had been counting on, the fond belief that this was all a reasonable debate in which both sides had the general welfare of the nation at heart, that media bias, left wing educational imprinting and occasional regional fraud and racial politics were things we could live with-- are dead. We can recognize that they're dead, or we can keep on trying to live in a pre 11/08 world.

The fact of the matter is that we're on the losing side of a culture war, and its winners intend to wipe us out. Perhaps not physically, but as Americans, as free thinking individuals, as believers in something and anything other than their political dogma. We have the choice between offering up a tentative political opposition while learning to speak Newspeak, or we can begin fighting back.

Forget trying to grasp the center. The more we try to grasp the center, the more it moves to the left, so that even when we win, we lose. We need to make the center come to us, by pushing the country to the right.

That means formulating and communicating a positive vision for America, one that is relevant to the lives and needs of a majority of Americans that states clearly and decisively where we want this country to be in the next decade. A vision that we can and will begin carrying out immediately, in and out of office, in public and private life.

The inverse of that will be a negative vision of America under the left that is equally relevant to the lives and needs of a majority of Americans. One that will invert every single left wing virtue to show its ugly side and its negative consequences.

Institutions currently occupied by the left are hostile institutions. They must be pushed to the right, if possible, made inert or destroyed, if not. In many cases it is better to create new institutions than to try and reform enemy occupied ones. Uncovering corruption is an excellent way of attacking such institutions, discrediting them, and then working to reorganize, disable or destroy them.

Individuals in daily life can make institutions inert by disempowering them. Home schooling is one example of individually disempowering a hostile institution, while at the same time engaging in counter-programming. Collectively reducing funding for public schools, school voucher program and/ or creating alternative school systems that teach American values are examples of collective ways of disempowering hostile institutions while pushing education itself to the right.

It is important to remember that the left has bored down in great detail into the component systems of political and cultural institutions. It takes a great deal of attention to detail and insight to block and reverse their insinuations. But such an effort cannot be purely reactive. We must offer a positive political and cultural vision based on America's root consensus, and transform that consensus into fact.

It is not enough for example to merely end dependency on social services or reduce some taxes. That is a case of chopping at the branches, rather than the tree. We must instead recognize that the latter feeds the former, and that such functions and institutions will be inherently hostile ones, so that we have to reduce the ability of government to exercise such powers in the first place. And we must do so in the name of freedom and the personal prosperity of American citizens.

Similarly turning the function of immigration from a left wing one to a right wing one requires shifting the emphasis on the nature of immigration and the type of immigrants accepted, from one that benefits the world to one that benefits us. And to do so in the name of the security, welfare and prosperity of the American citizen.

We should not shy away from being controversial. We should not however be controversial for the sake of being controversial. The former is the way of Rush Limbaugh. The latter is the way of Ann Coulter. Red meat is always tempting, but getting things done is what really counts.

The defeats in 2006 and 2008 have left the Republican party shaken and confused. That is a bad state for the party, but it is also an opportunity for transformation and growth. Hitting bottom is a chance to rebuild yourself and rise again. For the Republican party that will require replacing fear and indecisiveness, with resolution and a relentless plan of action.

The times ahead will be tough, but those difficulties are a chance to shed the fat and build muscle for 2010 and 2012, and the elections ahead. The fluff will sooner or later fall away in the hard times. The celebrities that too many Republicans eagerly solicited have mostly gone already. So have the likes of Parker and Buckley. And that is good. Going from the bottom to the tough is a job for the principled and the tough minded. We have a long road and a hard fight ahead of us.

Welcome to the fight.

Who decides who's smart anyway? Apparently the media does. The same media decided that Obama, who can only speak from a teleprompter, was a genius, and Sarah Palin, was a dunce. The same media decided that Bush was a moron, and Al Gore, who recently informed us that the pole would be gone in 5 years, was and is a misunderstood prophet of our time.

This power of the press to anoint some as geniuses and others as fools, would be slightly more credibile if the media itself didn't constantly show off its own stupidity for all to see.

It's only natural that many anchormen would confuse Obama's ability to get fashionably dressed and read stuff off a teleprompter, with intelligence. After all it's pretty much what they do for a living.

And embracing deficit spending is natural enough for news corporations like the New York Times, which were busy spending themselves into bankruptcy. No wonder the Times loves the idea of "shovel ready" infrastructure projects, having built a white elephant of a headquarters that they're now being forced to unload on anyone who will take it.

You can't expect media organizations which match Obama's worst habits to criticize his own faults, which are after all their own faults as well. The problem of course is that the New York Times can declare bankruptcy and sell its headquarters, but who exactly can the United States sell its infrastructure too?

Thanks to the endless parade of bailouts, bad corporate behavior has now morphed into bad government policy, and Obama's national socialism allows him to promote the worst in both capitalism and socialism. But corporations can go bankrupt, America can't.

The media that refused to question the same bad Wall Street behavior that they're now busy condemning, still doesn't have a clue. Not even when it comes to their own future.

Network newscast viewership is down. Major newspapers are folding, others are scrambling to avoid oblivion. Online viewership and ad revenues are not compensating for the losses in circulation. The writing isn't on the front page anymore, it's on the wall. And what it all means is that the "smartest people in the room" can't even save their own medium, but continue to presume that they're smarter than the rest of us, and can tell us how to save America.

The media hydra's manifold pundits and editorial writers, talking heads, anchormen and assorted smug know-it-alls, insist that they have all the answers for us-- but as it turns out they don't even have the answers for themselves.

Ask a New York Times columnist on what America needs to do in foreign policy, economic policy, national health care or just about anything, and he'll be happy to give you a detailed answer. Ask him what the major print media papers need to do to survive another decade, and you're likely to get a frustrated glare and some mumbled comments about the importance of the internet.

In the 20th century, the fourth estate became a serious proposition booming their message across a collection of mediums, radio, newspapers and television. Their paternalistic and later matriarchal voices told Americans what was best for them, which by the latter half of the 20th century, was inevitably what liberals felt was best. It was less Father Knows Best, than Anchorman Knows Best.

Obama is at once their great triumph and their failure. His careful management and control of the press is a reminder that the revolution eats its own, and that a tyrant is most paranoid about those who helped him reach power.

The 2008 election may be the last time that anyone seriously listens to the press anymore. With major newspapers going out of business or switching to online only editions, the twilight of the press is here. The picture isn't that much better for network news. CBS's Katie Couric gamble blew up in their faces, a gamble symptomatic of a once prestigious newscast desperate to salvage something from the looming spectre of its own irrelevance.

As network news viewership falls and age demographics rise, CBS, NBC and ABC newscasts are to be marked by the same tombstones currently rising over major newspapers. And newsmagazines aren't far behind either. Especially since Time Warner continues to be in big trouble.

When 2012 rolls around, it's unclear how many of the present day media mega-corporations will even be around. Stupid is as stupid does, and the same media giants which helped bring down America into this disaster, will at the very least achieve some measure of justice by pulling themselves down as well.

In the US, the ugliness behind Obama is beginning to float to the surface. Suddenly ACORN, responsible for much of the voter fraud behind Obama and the big Democratic Congress expansion is under the microscope.

In an startling partisan shift, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers Jr. on Thursday proposed holding hearings on claims the liberal activist group ACORN engaged in a pattern of crimes ranging from voter fraud to a mob-style “protection” racket.

Mr. Conyers, Michigan Democrat and fierce partisan, suggested a congressional probe after scathing testimony about the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) during a hearing on various voting issues related to the 2008 presidential election.

The testimony by Pittsburgh lawyer Heather Heidelbaugh accused the nonprofit group of violating tax, campaign-finance and other laws by, among other things, sharing with the Barack Obama campaign a list of the Democrat's maxed-out campaign donors so ACORN could use it to solicit them for a get-out-the-vote drive.

She also testified that the Democrat-allied group provided liberal causes with protest-for-hire services and coerced donations from targets of demonstrations through a shakedown it called the “muscle for the money” program.

If Conyers has suddenly switched sides, either ACORN is suddenly a threat to him, or the group is headed for so much hot water that even Conyers doesn't want anything to do with them.

Either way we're seeing both new revelations and new tensions as the Democratic majority splits apart into conflicting groups, creating greater friction, which can build up to bigger and bigger explosions.

Meanwhile Obama's AIG hypocrisy hit the mainstream news media. Obama had decided to calm public disgust with the huge nationalization bailouts by taking on a safe target, Wall Street executives who were his own contributors, and whose contributions he had repaid about a 1000 to 1. But being two faced and with David Axelrod pulling the Teleprompter in Chief's strings, he decided to make them a good temporary target for outrage... something that naturally would shore up his public support enough to keep spending hundreds of billions on Wall Street bailouts.

And then the whole thing began to unravel. Obama was busy demonstrating why he's kept tethered to a teleprompter in the first place, when he compared AIG to a suicide bomber on the radio, and then headed to Leno to promote his economic plan, with a joke about the Special Olympics.

But in the meantime Senator Dodd admitted that he had inserted an amendment protecting AIG executive bonuses, and blamed Obama's pet economic whiz kid, Timothy Geither. Suddenly CNN was asking, who knew about the bonuses and when did they know it.

While Media Matters was rushing to defend first Dodd and then Obama with explanations that became increasingly irrelevant, the media began at once covering and minimizing a scandal, that was actually created by Obama's people and rebounded on him.

Dodd is currently claiming that he had no idea what the legislation he wrote actually meant. Like most liars, Dodd managed to contradict himself over and over again.

Dodd said he was misled on the issue of bonuses for AIG executives. He claimed he would not have drafted key legislative changes allowing the bonuses to move forward if he knew the purpose of those changes.

This excuse leaves Dodd looking completely incompetent, since if he doesn't know what legislation he's drafting, shouldn't he admit senility and retire?

This accompanied a parade of other excuses, claiming that others had put the language in, that he had resisted it... which is rather odd since why would he resist it if he didn't know anything about it.

Despite Dodd blaming Obama's own administration for making him put it in, Obama was still free to go on Leno and talk about how shocked he was by the AIG bonuses, despite the minor detail that he had signed the bill containing the amendment. Something that no doubt had nothing to do with him being the second largest recipient of AIG money in the Senate.

All this leaves Obama and Dodd with a choice between pleading incompetence, in not knowing what the bills they drafted and signed say, or corruption.

And since one abuse of power follows another, the AIG bailout is naturally followed by the AIG bonus tax, a blatantly illegal abuse of the tax code as penalty aimed at perpetuating a political circus, against Obama's political donors\capitalist enemies of the state.

Two months in and it's painfully clear that Nixon had nothing on Obama. A point only driven further home when Obama's paranoid culture of secrecy and media control, caused him to receive a newspaper association's award in an event... closed to the press.

Obama White House bars press from press award ceremony

We are not making this up:

Barack Obama was elected commander in chief promising to run the most transparent presidential administration in American history.

This achievement and the overall promise of his historic administration caused the National Newspaper Publishers Assn. to name him "Newsmaker of the Year."

The president is to receive the award from the federation of black community newspapers in a White House ceremony this afternoon.

The Obama White House has closed the press award ceremony to the press.

From the president's official schedule:

"Later in the afternoon, the President and the First Lady will attend a reception with the National Newspaper Publisher Association in the State Dining Room, where they will be presented the Newsmaker of the Year award. This event is closed press."

Maybe they'll let the newspaper people pass the award through the fence.

-- Andrew Malcolm

It is truly hard to top.

But Obama hasn't just been doing Leno, he's doing Ahmadinejad too. While flagrantly ignoring America's allies in the Muslim world, or outright undermining them in the case of Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel and Pakistan...

Obama has a special message for Iran.

The man who could hardly be bothered to deal with Britain's Prime Minister, or give him the right region DVD's, is busy contorting himself into loops for Ahmadinejad.

Naturally Iran responded by promising to bring on the nukes by the end of the year.

Meanwhile buyer's remorse on Obama is spreading. Some of the Catholic and Evangelical figures who went out for Obama are now realizing that any promise of moderation on abortion was a lie. Unsurprising when you consider that Obama's biggest non-minority margin of victory was among unmarried women.

"Mexico City, conscience clause, Sebelius, embryonic stem cells... In each case, I have been asked by friends at Democratic or progressive-leaning think tanks not just to refrain from opposing these moves, but instead to support them in the name of a broader understanding of what it means to be pro-life. I mainly refused.

A broader understanding of pro-life that naturally wouldn't include the lives of unborn babies. A nice euphemism indeed. I'm sure David Axelrod is smirking somewhere.

Speaking of Pro-Life, in Religion of Peace news, we may be seeing the beginning of a new terror trend in Israel, with bulldozing attacks now supplemented by restaurant poisoning attacks.

The terrorist, Ihab Abu Rial, is a member of the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade, a group associated with Fatah which is headed by Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas.

Abu Rial worked for three years at the “Grill Express” restaurant. Together with a fellow employee who was his accomplice, he planned to poison the restaurant’s clients in early 2008.

They planned to carry out the poisoning in the early afternoon on a Tuesday, a time at which the restaurant is usually packed with diners. The two intended to use a white, odorless poison, and tasteless powder with a slow-release component which would have been undetectable when slipped into the food, in order to maximize the number of diners hurt.

Sick, evil and inevitable.

Israel provides employment to far too many Arabs. The restaurant poisonings are a consequence of that, just as the bulldozer attacks are. And the constant pandering and support given to Fatah murderers, insures that they will only be strengthened to commit further atrocities.

This attack may have failed, but especially with news of it out, similar copycat attacks will follow. And sooner or later they will succeed. With the Religion of Peaceful Slaughter, there is no middle ground. Either you resist, or die and watch your loved ones die horribly as well.

Time and time again, Muslim populations in non-Muslim countries that become radicalized, become sources of domestic and international terrorism. The UK is currently facing the same situation and with the same combination of pandering and ineptness.

And people will die.

Britons should 'wake up before it is too late' or suffer another 7/7 terror attack, hate cleric Omar Bakri has warned.

In a sinister rant, the warped preacher threatened that ordinary Muslims living here would rise up and retaliate for the 'evil' acts of British soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

'You want to declare war against us? We will declare Islam against you. It is time for you to wake up before it is too late.

And on that we can agree with Omar Bakri. It is time to wake up and choose a side. The only difference between Barki and the so called moderate Muslim leadership, is discretion not belief. In their view the likes of Bakri or Osama are moving too fast too soon. Which is lucky for us in a way, because this serves as a wake up call, a glimpse into the near future before the public is ready for it.

In Israel meanwhile the political chaos continues, with the formerly dominant Labor Party threatening to splinter into three parties. Meanwhile the Israeli Communist Party will be holding their own conference from hell in Tel Aviv University, dedicating to examining how Israel is evil and should be destroyed.

The decision to hold the congress on the campus of Tel Aviv University was no doubt made thanks to the presence of a large number of open self-declared communists on the faculty there. Among those to speak at the communist convocation will be communist Prof. Yoav Peled of TAU's political science department and Prof. Gadi Algazi , who is on the faculty of the history department at TAU. They are joined by the far-leftist anti-Israel Prof. Daniel Bar-Tal, of the TAU psychology department, best known for his pseudo-academic research "proving" that Jews are racists and opposed to peace, based on the drawings of Jewish school children.

Other comrades to be organizing the dictatorship of the proletariat at the Tel Aviv University gulag include Uri Ram, a sociologist from Ben Gurion University, who thinks Israel's very existence is a crime against humanity. The party hacks from the communist party will also be addressing the congress.

These days instead Canada is emerging as the beacon of sanity, banning Galloway from entering the country, as a terrorist supporter. (Also a giant cat impersonator)

Naturally Galloway will now claim Canada is run by the Jews. At a time when the UK throws open its doors to Hizbullah, Obama airs greeting to Ahmadinejad, Canada slams the door shut on a prominent Western terrorist puppet.

In the blogsphere roundup, Neocon Express comments on the Obama worship with an entire Barnes and Nobles section dedicated to "Obama Books"

Boker Tov Boulder passes on word from Caroline Glick that Scowcroft may be in line for Freeman's NIE post. As if there's a difference.

At ACT, Obama's diplomacy has opened the door for further Taliban demands

Via Lgstarr, a top Schumer aide may be headed to jail, instead of working his way up in politics. It's a start.

Shallow Thought takes on the raw UN deal

Citizen Warrior tackles the question, Are you an Islamophobe?

Bare Naked Islam, has the new Homeland Security Secretary replacing Muslim Terrorism with the more PC term, "Man Caused Disasters".

Meanwhile at Covertress, North Korea is asking for a discontinuation of humanitarian supplies.

This ends the week.