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Home Friday Afternoon Roundup - I Am Not a Barackader

Friday Afternoon Roundup - I Am Not a Barackader






WASTED OPPORTUNITIES

I haven't written about the shutdown, but I haven't written much about the debate around the shutdown itself.

In a way I said everything that I had to say about this back in 2010 after the midterm elections.

1. Creating Jobs Through Deregulation - While Obama pushes more phony job creation programs through regulation and spending, the Republicans have to focus on creating jobs through deregulation, by getting government off the back of the small businessman and the freelancer. That means not just opposing the next wave of the Obama agenda, but also creating tangible reforms that will mean less paperwork, less fees and fewer regulations for American small businesses to worry about. If the Republican congress can push a program that will actually make a difference at the ground level, then they will have won some key allies, particularly among independent voters.

2. Repeal Positively - It's great that Boehner is talking about repealing ObamaCare, but while it's important to do that, and jettison as much of Obama's agenda as possible-- but it is also vital not to be defined by it. For the first two years being the Party of No was a successful strategy, but a sizable amount of voters expect more than just vetoes or repeals. Being the Party of No while in the opposition was important, but being the Party of No while dominating the House is poor strategy. During the next election, it will be important for Republicans to remind the public, not just that they repealed what Obama did in his first two years, but how they followed a roadmap for restoring America.

The GOP failed to show that their victories had any tangible benefits except roadblocking some of Obama's agenda. That's enough for some support as a balance of power. And that's what the GOP Congress has become. It's why we are where we are, with both sides struggling to shift the balance of power.

The public doesn't particularly like either side and while a lot of that is due to the media-entertainment complex doing its things, the Republicans haven't done much about it.

Gingrich understood that you had to win through clear messaging about a positive agenda. For all his faults, there really isn't anyone who understands that and is ready to take a leadership role doing it.

The thing to understand about Obama is that he has nothing to lose. He's not a senator or a congressman. He doesn't follow any laws unless he chooses to. And he can always do anything he wants by pushing it forward unless it's wildly unpopular.

That was why he had to back off Syria. ObamaCare is unpopular. It's not however Bomb Syria unpopular. It's not wildly unpopular with everyone. But it could be.

The strongest messaging on ObamaCare came from the Tea Party before those midterm elections. Ted Cruz has been trying to get some of that spirit back. But it's not enough. And while opposition from a citizen's group is respected, opposition from an elected party whose members get paid government salaries is measured not just by what they don't do, but what they do.

Right now everyone knows that the Republican Party is against ObamaCare. There is much less sense of what they are for. And that gap is filled by SNL routines, celebrity tweets, media rants and biased journalism. (Killing kids, oppressing the poor, hating black people, etc.) But to some extent, it's the failure of the Republican Congress to define itself in the way that Gingrich was able to that is to blame. If you don't define yourself, you will be defined.

Republican opposition to ObamaCare would be far more effective if the public didn't just know what the GOP is against, but also what it's for. And what it has accomplished.

That last element is the important one. The Republican Congress has been boxed in by the incomplete victories of 2010. Obama is not boxed in because he does what he wants. That lets him point to a list of "accomplishments" while the Republicans are dismissed as obstructionists.

Too many opportunities have been wasted. And this is another one of them.





SAVING THE BROTHERHOOD

The successful counterrevolutions against Muslim Brotherhood rule may have actually salvaged its reputation.

Had the Brotherhood gone down in complete economic disaster, it would have been obvious that it was not only brutal and tyrannical, but also incompetent at everything except setting up front organizations and infiltrating other movements. Instead the Brotherhood has been able to play the victim. Instead of being seen as a failure, it has reinvented brutal power-hungry thugs like Morsi as revolutionary martyrs.

Imagine if the Bolsheviks had been forced out in the 1920s. Millions of lives would have been saved, but Stalin would have been remembered as a political martyr, instead of as a monster.

When The Arab Spring Died




Biden Thanks NPS Worker for “Her Service” Blocking Vets from WW2 Memorial




UNCAIR

CAIR’s critics, including Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a feminist and ex-Muslim, are smeared with out of context quotes.

CAIR’s Islamophobia report claims that Ayaan Hirsi Ali “asserted that Breivik ‘had no other choice but to use violence’ because his ‘views were censored.’” The very Think Progress source that CAIR footnotes the quote with however shows her saying, “He says, he had no other choice but to use violence.”

The omission is important. Ayaan Hirsi Ali isn’t giving her own view; she’s quoting Breivik while calling him abhorrent, but warning that silencing people is not the answer.

CAIR might do well to consider the fate of its Muslim Brotherhood parent organization. All the Muslim Brotherhood’s lies couldn’t keep the Egyptian people from waking to what it truly stood for. Does CAIR really believe that what didn’t even work in Egypt will somehow work in America?

CAIR’s Islamophobia Meltdown




Bill de Blasio, Supporter of Anti-Semitic Communist Terrorists, Claims Republican Opponent is Extremist




POPULATION BOOM

A population larger than Iowa City will be “coming to America”. The Boston Marathon Bombers of tomorrow have to start somewhere.

Barack Obama has determined that up to 70,000 refugees will be admitted to the U.S. during fiscal year 2014.

In his memorandum for Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday, Obama said his decision is “justified by humanitarian concerns or is otherwise in the national interest.”

Obama to Bring 70,000 Refugees to America in 2014







HIJAB JIHAD FAIL

Obama Inc’s pet EEOC personnel have scored victories in their Hijab Jihad against Disney and Abercrombie and Fitch. But now they have suffered a setback.

The EEOC’s witness on behalf of the Hijab was apparently John Esposito, the director of Georgetown University’s Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center.

Esposito is funded by Saudi money and Saudi Arabia has been aggressively pushing the Hijab Jihad against women abroad.

Saudi Arabia’s religious police stopped schoolgirls from leaving a blazing building because they were not wearing correct Islamic dress, according to Saudi newspapers.

Federal Appeals Court Strikes Down Obama Inc’s Claim that Hijab Ban is Discriminatory




CULT OF DEATH

The story of Nancy Verhelst is the story of the failure of modern Western civilization. It begins with a liberal society providing deformative “transgender” surgery and ends with the society providing euthanasia.

Nancy was rejected by her mother. Instead of dealing with that problem, the establishment instead perversely decided to address the lack of a mother’s love by mutilating a grown woman into some warped creature that would only loosely resemble a man, but could never be a man, to meet the wishes of a mother who hated her.

And when Nancy continued suffering. There was another solution. Death.

Transgender Woman who Tried to Turn Herself Into a Man After Rejection by Mother Kills Herself




I Am Not a Criminal” Senator Harry Reid says as Illegal Campaign Donor is Jailed

Nixon’s “I am not a crook” is listed as one of the top 10 unfortunate political quotes. Senator Reid’s “I am not a criminal” may shortly join that list.

On Monday, Harry Reid’s close friend and donor, Harvey Whittemore was sentenced to two years in prison for funneling more than $130,000 in illegal campaign funds to Sen. Harry Reid’s re-election committee in 2007.  He received three felony convictions, his sentence includes $100,00 in fines and 100 community service hours.  Whittemore was a former Nevada power broker and named the most powerful lobbyist in Nevada who worked for gambling, alcohol and tobacco industries.  His nickname was the “64th legislator”.

According to the Las Vegas Review Journal, Reid and Whittemore go way back; four of Reid’s sons were hired by the law firm in which Harvey Whittemore was a senior partner. Sen. Reid and Whittemore were involved in very big land deals, including federal legislation to help the development of Coyote Springs.

So Senator Reid decided that this was the perfect time to defend his character.

The Nevada Democrat also defended his role in fighting Republican attempts to water down Obamacare as a condition to keeping the government open, responding directly to a National Review piece that called him the “villain of villains.”

“When I read this yesterday, I thought, no one likes to be called a villain,” Reid said, reading aloud definitions of the word that mean “uncouth,” “scoundrel” or “criminal.” “I am not a criminal. I am not a scoundrel. So they better get a different definition of me.”


NOW IT CAN BE TOLD


The official Syrian RTV agency says that Syria is the last obstacle for Jews to finally take over the world.

“The pre-war on Syria, and the current war on Syria, is World War III.”

"To those who think this is just a conspiracy theory I invite them to read the Torah and the Talmud and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and specifically to read the policies included in the book of Isaiah 16: [sic - it is 17:] 1.

The burden of Damascus. Behold, Damascus is taken away from being a city, and it shall be a ruinous heap.

2. The cities of Aroer are forsaken; they shall be for flocks, which shall lie down, and none shall make them afraid.

 3. The fortress also shall cease from Ephraim, and the kingdom from Damascus; and the remnant of Aram shall be as the glory of the children of Israel, saith the Lord of hosts.

 Syria Claims It’s the Only Thing Stopping a Jewish Takeover of the Planet

Comments

  1. The GOP failed to show that their victories had any tangible benefits except roadblocking some of Obama's agenda.

    An excellent observation which all adds up to Business as Usual™ and is nowhere near enough to prevent them from being perceived as an almost equal part of the problem ... which Republicans are. The GOP has about as much to do with Conservatism as a giant squid does with the Tour de France.

    America's bipartisan system has been so thoroughly corrupted by special interest money that it no longer serves the electorate. We are now in a one party system of the almighty dollar.

    Gingrich understood that you had to win through clear messaging about a positive agenda. For all his faults, there really isn't anyone who understands that and is ready to take a leadership role doing it.

    If Gingrich represents salvation for the GOP, they're in far worse trouble than anyone can imagine.

    Had the [Muslim] Brotherhood gone down in complete economic disaster, it would have been obvious that it was not only brutal and tyrannical, but also incompetent at everything except setting up front organizations and infiltrating other movements.

    Which is why Muslims must be allowed to get the government that they deserve. As Bonaparte observed:

    Never interfere when your enemy is making a mistake.

    Muslims must learn for once and all time to be very careful about what they wish for. Shari'a law is one of those things and only its routine imposition by the Ikhwan will bring that notion home with a vengeance.

    Saudi Arabia’s religious police stopped schoolgirls from leaving a blazing building because they were not wearing correct Islamic dress, according to Saudi newspapers.

    This is one incident that, like the Beslan atrocity, must never be allowed to fade from public memory. I have written about it repeatedly, including as recently as May of this year. Read some good reporting about it here: "The Fire That Won't Die Out".

    Remember, the mutawa (morals police) were criticized over the deaths of fifteen schoolgirls (5 of burns, 10 were crushed to death). No charges of involuntary homicide or manslaughter, just criticized.

    The story of Nancy Verhelst is the story of the failure of modern Western civilization. It begins with a liberal society providing deformative “transgender” surgery and ends with the society providing euthanasia.

    What no one in the media is willing to talk about is the abnormally high suicide rate and psychological remorse among those who have undergone sexual reassignment surgery. (From the link.)

    A staggering 41 percent of transgender people in the United States have attempted to commit suicide, according to a new survey.

    These statistics are just some of the sobering findings from a survey of more than 7,000 transgender people conducted by the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, released in October 2010.

    Other risks In addition to their higher risk of suicide, transgender people face steeper odds for other health issues. For example, the recent survey found that 2.64 percent of trans people are infected with HIV — that's more than four times the national average rate of 0.6 percent in the general population.

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  2. Common 'tater4/10/13

    Daniel, sometimes your Friday round ups are mindboggling. Where do you find these stories? Regarding the Republicans: Many of us are sick of the usual party politics. I am fed up. When we looked to the GOP to defend our country & borders, and for some efforts to rebuild our economy, what did we get? RINO McCain, Patriot Act (you and I are the terrorists), and more jobs sent over to China.

    Regarding the person euthanized, the wrong person got the needle. I read the links. As for the news from Syria, Daniel, how ;many times have I told you to quit trying to conquer the world? It scares people, unless of course you belong to the religion that no one can criticize. Also, you get a bye if you are a member of said faith and you express yourself and your faith by mutilating other people and crash airplanes into buildings.

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  3. "The official Syrian RTV agency says that Syria is the last obstacle for Jews to finally take over the world"

    What an uninformed jerk. You guys did that years ago. :)

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  4. Anonymous5/10/13

    Obama: 'I Am Not A Dictator; I'm The President' - March 1, 2013

    Senator Reid’s “I am not a criminal” has to come in somewhere further down the list.
    Although, if there's any justice in the world, someday there will be a treason trials for the ring leaders of this Communist Coup d'état and Reid will be in the glass box right along with his leader.

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  5. Anonymous5/10/13

    This doesn't really have anything to do with what you're saying in this post, but I wanted to type it anyway to someone:

    I don't want to vote for people by party. I think it would be better if we had profiles which detailed what we stood for on various issues -- an online vote profile. This would make it clear what the people want, and everyone could detail where they stand on any number of issues, rather than broadly by only two or three parties. Elected representatives could still exist, and be voted for, but that vote too could be automatic as updated by your online profile, in a database, if such things can be trusted to be secure and unhacked, which is unlikely. But as it stands it doesn't seem like representative democracy is ideal, or that it couldn't use improvement. For instance, you might be a social conservative that wants larger government on certain issues, or you want less government, but are liberal socially. It's hard to find candidates to vote for.

    Also it doesn't seem to me that Republicans are particularly against ObamaCare, just some portions of it. Legislation like that becomes harder to oppose than for instance the Syria intervention because it's more difficult to know what it entails. It's so many pages. I'd be surprised if many people feel they understand it all.

    But Republicans pushed through equally unconstitutional legislation with the Patriot Act after 9/11. Again, I think if you are voting Republican or Democrat, you're just voting for more tyranny from an unjust government. We'll see more and more government bloat.

    We really should have much less government. I mean, we can't afford it anyway.

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  6. Horace Staccato5/10/13

    The Republicans are hopeless, but it's not because they are merely the party of "No." It's because they don't say no enough.

    What the U.S., and the Western world in general, needs is a massive repeal of the secular religion of politically-correct tyranny put in place by the Left during the past 50 years.

    The Republicans need to say NO to (in no particular order):

    Immigration of third-world savages, legal and illegal
    Homeland Security
    The vast majority of gun regulations
    Government hostility to Christianity
    Lively, vibrant diversity
    Affirmative action
    Draconian over-regulation of the economy
    Government debt
    A hard Left permanent bureaucracy
    "Nation building" wars
    Globalism
    Social Engineering
    "Free trade" which is a dishonest euphemism for making treaties with other countries that are good for them and horribly destructive to us. This self-destructive ideology has emerged from the fact that it is almost impossible to do business in the U.S. So for the sole benefit of short-term profits for corporations, our "government" decided to allow the corporations to essentially become foreign entities that are as hostile to the U.S. as is our "government."
    Etc.

    Unfortunately, the Republicans, out of simple cowardice, greed or boneheaded malevolence, have embraced most of the Leftist pathology.

    As we all know, Obama is a typical lying, cheating, stealing, traitorous Leftist tyrant who doesn't care if anything he does works as advertised. He is almost entirely destructive.

    But Bush was little better. Bush created the Housing Bubble by threatening, cajoling and allowing mortgage lenders to drop all ethics and standards for the sole purpose of giving housing loans to third-world savages from Mexico in the insane belief that this would turn these parasites into the brownish equivalent of high-achieving White Republicans. That was politically-correct, Leftist pathology. Bush believed in this. That means Bush was a functional idiot kowtowing to the Leftist narrative.

    911 was an example of domestic terrorism enabled by the fact that we allow third world savages into the U.S. and we are not allowed to give them the close scrutiny that they need and deserve. Bush responded in true Leftist fashion by creating Homeland Security; an oppressive, unconstitutional bunch of thugs that is most eager to target law-abiding, patriotic Whites. Once again, Bush panders to the Left by using a crime committed by third-world savages to oppress the very people the government fears the most; Prosperous Whites.

    Bush strained every nerve to give amnesty to millions of third-world savages from Mexico and import even more millions legally. Bush once again proved to be in the pocket of a treasonous Left.

    The current darling of the Tea Party, Cruz, is just another Bush.

    The Republicans need to wake up the reality that they are the Party of White People. That is a good thing. They need to grok this fully and somehow find the courage to openly admit it and act accordingly.

    We are now in a state of de facto civil war. It is time for blunt, open hostility to the Left and their lively, vibrant allies. They have declared themselves to be the enemy of Whites. They want to live in the most successful civilization in history, but they want to destroy the Whites who built it. As is typical of the Left, this is a self-destructive course driven entirely by envy and greed.

    All that remains is for Whites to wake up to this harsh reality. Then Whites will reach out and take back what is theirs. It won't be pleasant, but it is inevitable.

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  7. Horace Staccato wrote, "They want to live in the most successful civilization in history, but they want to destroy the Whites who built it."

    The stable, prosperous America of the past was WASP. In his essay, "Jews--The Archetypal Multiculturalists" Lawrence Auster asserted, "If America is to be restored as a nation, we must put to an end the pious fraud we have practiced since the 1960s, of simultaneously granting ethnic minorities the right to assert their distinct identity, and the right to speak for America as a whole, in which capacity they have stripped America of its identity."

    http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/024334.html

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  8. The essay more obviously reflects Auster's issues with his Jewish background than anything else. His belated foreword makes it clear that he sees some of the problems, with what is basically a loosely connected rant about Jews, but didn't choose to change it.

    I had some dialogues with him via email about immigration where he insisted that Jews had one standard for immigration in the US and another in Israel.

    I showed him that the exact same debate was taking place in Israel between the right and left and for the same stakes. He had no answer.

    Auster was most familiar with the liberal and secular Jewish milieu that he had come out of. He had little understanding of anything Jewish beyond that.

    It's like reading the work of someone who grew up in a Unitarian family and could not conceive of any religion or culture outside that bubble and mistook that for Christianity.

    Auster conflated Jewishness with liberalism because he had no experience of anything else. He had met Jewish conservatives, but he could not conceive of Jews living as a group in any other way than the secular liberal world he was familiar with.

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  9. Republicans from today on should make their new platform the reduction of government to "shutdown" level.

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  10. I take your point, Daniel, but it doesn't change what I said about America or what I took from the essay. And that was the matter to which I was responding. My own family background can attest to what I said; not exactly Anglo-Saxon but we've been in North America so long we certainly are Anglicized. You have said elsewhere that "white" is just a response or defense to multiculturalism. I beg to differ. Where I grew up, people had some inkling of their families' having come, somewhere back in the mists of time, from somewhere else, but indeed they identified simply as white. Someone recently posted a comment in SK that quoted a latter-day, would-be French philosophe that Judaism is the "only worldly religion" that went unchallenged. I thought Auster's essay expounded possibilities inherent in that theme very well.

    Auster conflated Jewishness with liberalism, because of having been raised in that milieu. But he is hardly the only one. I have one such friend from college who has moved so far to the left over the years we don't even speak any more. Is being raised in a liberal Jewish milieu the only environment that leaves you with blind spots as to the whole? Why not address yourself to the issues the limited Auster raises? Obviously, despite Mr. Communism's himself being Jewish, liberalism and Jewishness are not the same. And, maybe I just really don't like Bob Dylan or J.D. Salinger, along with the Baby Boomers who idolized them. But, who has wielded more influence here in freedom's land, Jewish liberals or Jewish conservatives? And, more importantly, what does any of it mean for America?

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  11. If Judaism is a worldly religion, one wonders what that says about Christianity.

    Everyone has their blind spots. And the place they come from often represents those spots.

    Auster raises a hundred issues, including blaming Jews because Jon Voight is the villain in Mission Impossible.

    As for Mr. Communism, by which I assume you mean Karl Marx, he was born a Christian of Jewish descent. He was less Jewish than Lawrence Auster who converted fairly late in his years. And he hated Jews even more than Auster did.

    You can dislike Bob Dylan or J.D. Salinger, so long as you remember that Woody Guthrie and Jack Kerouac was far more influential than Salinger. And Henry Miller was far worse than all of them put together.

    This didn't begin with the Baby Boomers. They just made it far worse.

    As for the influence of Jewish conservatives in America, I'm not sure what the Republican Party would look like today if Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises had never existed.

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  12. It was not I who said either that Judaism, or Christianity, is "a worldly religion." And I still don't know what that means. Do you?

    It goes without saying everyone has their blind spots. Am I supposed to apologize for where I come from? Why? What makes someone else's blind spots better than mine?

    I have no use for Jon Voight or Mission Impossible, like almost everything that's come out of Hollywood in the last forty or fifty years; and I don't know the inference Auster was drawing. Perhaps something to do with the influence of liberal Jews in Hollywood? Or is that question completely out of bounds of good taste? I was informed once Auster didn't much like Kathrine Hepburn either.

    You're right, it's probably safe to say Karl Marx hated everybody. Or as good as. But levying criticism is the same thing as hating?

    Woody Guthrie, Woody Allen, Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller ... they all make my skin crawl.

    Whatever you say, vis-a-vis Baby Boomers.

    I could do without much of the adulation of Ayn Rand, but I would certainly take von Mises. That doesn't really answer the question of who has weilded more influence though.

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  13. “What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. Money is the jealous god of Israel, in the face of which no other god may exist… The god of the Jews has become secularized and has become the god of the world.”

    That's Karl Marx. I would call that hating.

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  14. Yeah, that's hating or a darn good facsimile thereof. Although thinking hateful thoughts and even writing hateful books are not actual crimes. But my question referred to Auster. [Requiscet in Pace] You said he hated Jews. I would say he was in the minority in his generation who didn't hate America. And, if I feel overwhelmed and frustrated by Baby Boomers .... I think of him as being in the fine old Victorian tradition of cranky.

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  15. Hating might be too strong of a word, his foreword does suggest he knew that the essay was over the top, but he clearly had issues with that part of his background.

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  16. Mr. Auster's is an extensive archive of essays. Here's one I think hits the mark. http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/024298.html

    As to writers I do admire and a source of national disgrace that he is so ignored and ill-regarded, Thomas Berger is the best this continent has ever produced. Since 1958, he has been turning out probing, mysterious, hilarious, magnificent books, but was only ever a finalist for the Pulitzer in 1984 for 'The Feud.'

    He writes, "Almost nobody in the English-speaking world cares about style. My own is noticed only to be condemned. What even the cultured reader wants (especially the cultured reader) is to be confirmed in his own platitudes, moral, political, and most of all linguistic. Of course he can be prepared and manipulated by a great troop of beaters going on before, crying: "Here comes Joyce!" But then they study Joyce and do not read him, and for his part, he goes on, he writes so that he cannot be read but must be studied." (Thomas Berger letters to Zulfikar Ghose)



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  17. Writing, painting, designing to be "studied" not "read" is the great problem of most of the modern arts

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  18. Conceptually, there is no architecture. No epic sweep.

    A couple of addenda to yesterday's discussion.

    http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/10/03/more-white-evangelicals-than-american-jews-say-god-gave-israel-to-the-jewish-people/

    http://takimag.com/article/stranger_in_a_wasp_land_steve_sailer/print#axzz2h5ioFX00

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  19. When the set is limited to Orthodox Jews, then the numbers are about even.

    It makes very little sense to compare a passionately religious Christian denomination with a general Jewish population.

    It would make equally little sense to compare Americans, without regard to religious commitment, to Orthodox Jews.

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