Congratulations to athe winners and all vote-getters — for that matter to all teh nominees Winning Council Submissions First place with 2 1/3 points! – The Razor – ‘Physician Shortage’ and the Free Market Second place with 1 2/3 points……

The Watcher’s Council’s nominations for the week are UP! It’s Hard Out There For A ( Hamas) Pimp – Joshuapundit covers the plight of Gazan entrepreneurs, whose business is suffering due to Israeli raids. On The Conflict Against Hamas – Rhymes With R…

It’s worth asking how the ancient Hebrews would have been dealing with an enemy like Hamas. Oh wait–that question answers itself out of the text of the Bible; there is no lying down with the lion, leapard, or wolf until, as you point out, the necessity for war is no more. Liberals are always wanting us to lie down first, supine and belly up. The modern day Israelis have drunk too deeply from this well, and their current predicament is the result. I am hoping this iteration of the “cycle of violence” (idiotic term, no?) will have a different outcome, one harking back to when Israel knew how to be victorious and tell the Euro weenies to shove it.

While I think crucifixion is an appropriate punishment for Palestinians, because I know the exact details of crucifixion as well as some of its more unique artistic modifications, I don’t think the Palestinians have either the imagination or the historical framework to put crucifixion back into modern day punishment as it deserves.

You can count on the Arabs to pock up anything, of course, but they were only ever really good at torture and pain because the Soviets taught them everything they knew. What they can come up on their own… is not something I’d place much faith in.

I just don’t believe mothers want their children to grow up to be suicide bombers. I think the mothers want their children to grow up to go to university.

Given that many suicide bombers are university graduates, those are not incompatible goals you know.

But if the death of your political rival and his good reputation allows you to butter up your own political power base, why not use it? It would be a delicious irony, no.

You know that the correct and accurate translation of “toward peace” simply means “towards my pork barrel projects that will be able to buy me enough votes so that I can be perpetually re-elected”.

Thus, what the “war… in Iraq right now” is doing is drawing funds away from Ross Mirkarimi’s pot. Ross needs a Peace Dividend. Everybody should know what a Peace Dividend is.

Because of this same consideration (or tunnel vision), people like Feinstein will never truly appreciate the differences on the world stage as compared to pure domestic matters here in the US. The rules aren’t the same and even if they were, Feinstein would be too concerned with the domestic impact of her policies to see the true foreign policy consequences. And even if she did see the potential impact, she wouldn’t care about them, for the domestic front would be far more important to her power base.

As one example, try to guess one very critical criteria that went into convincing Congress members to vote to cut off funding for South Vietnam. It wasn’t concern for lives lost. It wasn’t concern for the best use of tax payer money. It wasn’t an appreciable attempt to manipulate foreign policy dynamics to better benefit a certain platform or nation or even the importance of Communist ideology. No, it was the fact that the funds being “wasted” on South Vietnam could be better used for domestic American factions in order to fund vote buying schemes and to pad the pork barrel projects of Congressional allies in the Democrat Party: utilizing funds that could be better utilized for the good of their loyalists.

That was what people died for and the Democrats see nothing inappropriate in that exchange. They sleep perfectly well at night.

It really doesn’t take a genius or prophet like Isaiah to understand that, when good people put down their arms in the face of evil, all you end up with is a whole bunch of dead good people.

So long as the dead bodies aren’t anybody Feinstein cares about, Book, she has more important things to consider. The greater good and all that. You know, Book.