Mid-day Sunday round-up and Open Thread

Victorian posy of pansiesIf you’ve ever wondered why I have a posy of flowers as the theme picture for my round-ups, it’s because my round-up is like a bouquet of interesting ideas, all bundled together in one place — kind of like that little posy of pretty flowers. So, here come the flowers….

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The DiploMad pulls no punches when describing the “Muslim Murder Machine“:

Islam is not a religion like the others; the jihadis and their M3 are followers of a totalitarian creed which far from being a “religion of peace” (the stupidest meme to come from the Bush administration) is a cult of death and slavery, of total submission. This is a “religion” that has undergone no enlightenment, and what reformation has taken place has been to push it back closer to its 7th century origins in the Arabian peninsula. It treats women like garbage, has a severe sexual code, has no compunction about killing anybody who transgresses that code especially women and gay men–although homosexual practices and pedophilia are rampant throughout the Muslim world–and sees Jews and Christians as prime targets for forced conversion, kidnapping, enslavement, other forms of subjugation, and murder. I should note that if Jews and Christians are not immediately available, M3 is willing to kill fellow Muslims, as we see, for example, right now in Syria and Iraq.

Tolerance is not a Muslim concept. Islam is the enemy of tolerance–not the mythical “radical” Islam, but straightforward everyday vanilla Islam is an enemy of tolerance.

If you go to a Muslim country, you must abide by Muslim rules and practices or Muslims will get offended and see your murder as justified; if Muslims come to your country, you must abide by Muslim rules and practices or Muslims will get offended and see your murder as justified.

Read the rest here. This is the kind of straight speaking we need about a death cult ideology that has American centered in its cross-hairs.

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It’s also the Muslim death cult that controls the dynamics of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in the Middle East. Muslims understand this. Israelis are beginning to understand this. American politicians don’t want to understand it.

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Yesterday, the N.Y. Post ran an excerpt from Edward Klein’s new book, Blood Feud: The Clintons vs. the Obamas, about the relationship between the Clintons and the Obamas. According to Klein’s sources, they despise each other. I have no doubt about but that this is true.  Four prima donnas crammed into the public eye are going to hate each other in their battle for the spotlight. Moreover, the by-play between the four of them rings true when one considers what we already know about these four characters.

Today’s N.Y. Post  excerpt purports to quote one of her anonymous “top legal advisers” who contends that the Benghazi cover-up was all Obama’s idea and that Hillary only reluctantly went along with it. I don’t believe a word of that. Cover-ups are Hillary’s stock in trade and I’m certain that she and Obama were equal partners in this crime.

I’ll be interested in hearing the spin on this story when one of Obama’s anonymous “top legal advisers” shoots back with Obama’s version of this conspiracy to cover up the administration’s despicable behavior before and during the Benghazi massacre. In this telling, of course, it will all be Hillary’s idea.

Either way, Hillary and Obama will have convicted themselves of conniving to mislead the American people in order to win the White House in 2012.

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Thomas Lifson thinks that, just maybe, the scathing editorial that the Chicago Tribune (former home of David Axelrod) wrote about the IRS cover-up might signal that the dam is finally breaking on the logjam the drive-by media has hidden behind so as to avoid talking about both the IRS’s crime and its cover-up. I hope he’s right. Even Lifson, though, concedes that the IRS still holds the power: “The IRS holds unique power over corporate America.”

The only way that the drive-by media can report on the cover-up is for all of them to go into it together. Standing alone, each is vulnerable to IRS manipulation. Together, though, they’re pretty invulnerable, especially since each can report on the IRS’s harassment of the others.

Let’s hope, therefore, that the drive-by media discovers the wisdom of Benjamin Franklin: “We must hang together, gentlemen…else, we shall most assuredly hang [or be audited] separately.”

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It’s amazing what happens when you take Doonesbury cartoons from the Watergate era and, keeping most of the original text, simply change out a few words to make each cartoon relevant, not to Watergate, but to IRS-gate.

Enjoy these revised cartoons while you can. I suspect that, very soon, the attorneys representing Gary Trudeau will come knocking at the door and politely say, “Please remove these copyright infringing cartoons, or else.” There’s an argument to be made that political parodies constitute fair use, but the argument is only as good as the judge hearing the case.

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The media may be trying to avoid the IRS scandal, but the IRS is not helping, since it keeps digging deeper holes for itself.  It began when Lois Lerner’s computer turned out to have “crashed” within weeks of learning that Congress was going to investigate gross malfeasance which saw the IRS trying to destroy any groups or individuals who could interfere with Obama’s presidency and reelection.  We then learned that six other relevant computers conveniently crashed then too.

With that story out there, the IRS had to deal with all sorts of people pointing out that the IRS is required by law to back up all of its computer data. Things got worse when the folks at Reason discovered that an email backup company was boasting that it had a contract with the IRS.

With an email backup company on the scene, it looked as if the IRS would have to ‘fess up and produced the emails . . . except that it turns out that the IRS has another cover-up in its place: After all seven computers conveniently crashed just on the cusp of a Congressional investigation, the IRS cancelled its contract with the email backup service.

All of which leads to the inevitable next question: “Was Sonasoft required to purge its records? If so, why? What did the IRS do with the backup records?”

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Remember the uproar when George H.W. Bush was impressed by a computerized cash register? He was rightly impressed, because it was a new technology, but the media used the story to show Bush as an out-of-touch rich man. They couldn’t make enough of the story.

The media’s changed a lot since then. Reporters are assiduously ignoring the bizarre spectacle of the fabulously wealthy Hillary Clinton trying to paint herself as financially struggling. While she’s backed off her risible claim that she and Bill were dead broke when they left the White House, she’s now saying that she “isn’t truly well off.” Coming from a women sitting on tens of millions of dollars, that gaffe should be on every front page . . . but it’s not, of course.

No wonder conservatives are again enjoying a 2009 Onion parody story showing reporters trying to figure out if a story about Obama cold-bloodedly murdering two people is even newsworthy.

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Sadie took a quiz on Quizifed (and no, I’m not providing the link) and was unsurprised to learn that she’s a conservative. What did surprise her is the vicious, ignorant terms in which it describes “right wingers”:

Quizify maligns conservatives

Wow!  We conservatives are “regressive,” we hate human-kind, and we become anarcho-capitalists or fascists.  Whoever came up with that definition seems to be unaware of the fact that conservatives actually believe that individuals are wonderful, and should be free to unleash their energy and creativity to better humankind.  We realize that the best system for harnessing both the good and bad in people’s energy and initiative is capitalism, that it’s the Left that lives in the past, and that both Naziism and Italian fascism were socialist (i.e., Leftist).  Were I to re-write their text, it would say:

“Right wing” (also known as “conservative”) refers to an ideology that believes that people, not the government, are the source of innovation and wealth creation, and that the free market best harnesses people’s gifts, while providing an appropriate, positive outlet for innovation, competitiveness, and even greed.  They fear that increased government power can lead to socialism, as happened with the Nazis and Italian fascists; to communism, as happened in Cuba, China, and the former Soviet Union; to totalitarian personality cults, as happened in North Korea; or to military juntas, as happened in Argentina.  Smaller government, on the other hand, allows people maximum freedom and wealth creation, which benefits all citizens.

Curious now, about how the Quizified team would describe “left wingers,” I took the quiz, responding as a good Leftie should. The results were very different:

Quizified nice to Leftists

Isn’t that anodyne?  Leftists believe so strongly in people’s goodness that they also believe that the only way to control this goodness is through massive government strength.  Moreover, “Taken to its logical conclusion, left wing politics becomes some form of socialism.”

No wonder uninformed, brainwashed people shy away from describing themselves as conservative.

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Jeffrey Tucker has noticed that climate change true believers react with irrational fanaticism when anyone dares challenge their faith.

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A school in Sweden has revealed that every single girl in one of its classes is a victim of female genital mutilation. There is nothing good about FGM. The procedure is unsanitary and primitive, and can lead to infection and hemorrhaging. The sole purpose behind the procedure is to destroy women’s sexual pleasure. Depending on how extreme it is, the girl can end up with no clitoris; no labia; neither clitoris nor labia, and, in extreme cases, with her vaginal entry sewn almost entirely closed. It is the essence of evil misogyny.

It’s also nothing like circumcision, which has long been known to decrease dangerous diseases (including AIDS) in both men and their female partners. It’s not a painful procedure, with many infants sleeping through it. And here’s the kicker: we finally know that, rather than decreasing sexual pleasure, it can increase it:

One of the other reasons often cited for opposing circumcision — decreased penile sensitivity in circumcised men — is not borne out by science.

As researchers studied whether circumcision helped prevent the spread of HIV, they were able to conduct far better studies than before on penile sensitivity.

One inquiry included thousands of Kenyan men who were split into two random groups, only one of which would have its participants circumcised.

With a large sample of previously uncircumcised men now willing to be circumsized for the study, scientists finally had a basis for comparing sensitivities re: circumcision, and their findings belied the conventional wisdom.

“Overall, the circumcised men actually report that their penises are more sensitive [after circumcision], and that they have an easier time reaching orgasm,” the authors wrote.
Further, in a collective review of 10 studies using almost 20,000 men as subjects, scientists “did not see any differences between circumcised and uncircumcised men in terms of sexual desire, pain during sex, premature ejaculation, problems with erections, or problems with orgasms.”

Score another point for Biblical wisdom.